Terelj National Park & UB

Welcome friend to our last chapter of this adventure. This will be our last proper blogpost. I'm writing this, sitting in the metal eagle carrying us back to our home land. It makes me really sad but before I become to melancholy I want to tell you about our last four days of travelling.

We ended our last story with our arrival back in the capital of the kingdom of horseriding and gers. We arrived quite late and just got ourselves some dinner before falling into the realm of sleep.

The next morning we were still quite slumbersome and pushed any activities to the later hours. Breakfast had been a bit disappointing. There was nothing left of the meager breakfast our inn provided but thankfully we still had some oats left of our time in the lands of chopsticks and dragons. We spend the morning hours planning our following days and writing the chapters about our great tour into the desert. Hunger lured us out of our hiding place. We were craving some elvish food and were intrigued by a mongolian restaurant offering elvish food. This is a most unique combination as Mongolian foods main ingredient are the things left out of an elvish diet. To quote Sesy: if you cannot eat the grass, you have to eat the things that eat the grass. The food made us very happy hobbits, but while the dishes might have Mongolian names they did not taste anything like the sustenance we received in the Gobi desert (this is not necessarily a bad thing). After lunch we ventured to the southern part of the city to the place where locals sell their goods and crafts. It was indeed a remarkable place. Though we did not stay too long. Our mortal enemy was high in the sky again and was beating down on us relentlessly. We dearly missed our friend the snowman from our time in the kingdom of great walls and dumplings. Searching for a potion that would replenish our strength, we found a market of all things where we each got a juice and a tonic water. These gave us the power to walk back to our inn and prepare our selves some sustenance for dinner.

27.6.

New day, new energy, new quest. Today we wanted to reach the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park. It is a place full of green hills, lush forests and "nice rocks". While it is technically not that far from the settlement to these rocks, it took us a long time to reach them. But let me start at the beginning of the tale. Our inn has two characters working there. One male, one female. Both speak excellent English, but in any other way they are opposites of each other. The man is about as bright as Gregory Goyle. Whenever we asked him something it took him 1 minute to react and it completely overwhelmed him if we asked two questions at once. The woman is a delight to ask anything. She can give you an answer in seconds and can organise anything for you within a matter of minutes. To show you the contrast. The previous day Artey went into the office in the morning to pay, ask for the best way to the National Park and ask for a transport to the meeting hub of metal birds. Sadly, only the man was present. It took him about 5 minutes to add the two amounts we had to pay and another 3 to fetch the card machine and type the correct number in. At that point Artey has stupid enough to ask for the way to the NP. That were too many task at once. He struggled in deciding what to do first: look at his smart application which could tell him the answer to Artey's question or finish setting up the payment machine. He tried to do a bit of both, going back and forth between the two without managing either properly. Eventually, Artey did get a piece of parchment with three sets of busses we would have to take to get to the NP. He said he would have to ask someone else for the transport. He also didn't know how to book a camp in the park or if there would be any beds for us at our return to Ulaanbator. Later that day, the woman was present. We talked to her for not even 5 minutes. In these 5 minutes we organised a free transport to the meeting hub, booked a camp in Terelj NP and two beds at our return to UB. We sadly did not ask her how we could find the camp. Back to the day we wanted to reach the park. Without knowing how to find the camp, we could not depart (we could also not find it in the library of all things) so we waited. We expected either of the two managers to appear some time in the morning to answer our question. However they seemed to be stuck in the realm of sleep for quite some time and did not arrive before noon. Thankfully the woman was there first and could give us the answer we needed within a minute. So we departed full of motivation for our next quest. The first thing we did was get into the bus into the wrong direction. We did not get very far before we noticed our mistake so we were only delayed by twenty minutes or so. Any travel day needs a bit of chaos we thought, especially when we are on the way to our last quest. At a large meeting point of busses we got off and ate our prepared lunch. We don't go anywhere without food and we definitely needed the power of it that day. After a short wait the second bus the man had put on our sheet of parchment arrived and we were whisked away. It was generally going in the right direction so we thought we had successfully managed the next stage of this quest. We arrived 45 minutes later at a small village near UB and there we waited. And waited. Several other busses passed but none of them was bearing the number of the bus we were told to take on.

After an hour of waiting we asked at one of the other busses if it might go to our destination too. The confused driver shook his head but briefly talked to a local woman before he left. She came over to us and used a translator to tell us that there was no method of transportation at all going to Terelj from this village. Well, that was unfortunate. Looking around confused brought us the needed salvation: A local fluent in the language of the island of tea and scones stopped with his car near us and told us that the right bus would be departing from meeting hub we had taken the second bus from. He was even offered to take us there and so we travelled back to UB. On the way his wife called some people to investigate at what time this bus would leave. Around 4.30 pm we were back and still had one hour left before our next bus would hopefully arrive and depart. If you are now asking what did you do wrong that you ended up in this stupid village. Let me tell you: our nearly competent male inn manager had put a bus on our piece of parchment that was just absolutely unnecessary to take. Our third bus was departing from the last stop of our first bus. I have no idea why on earth he told us to take that second bus. Maybe he thought that village was a nice detour to take. Our third bus was also not remotely going near that village. We were briefly considering to just give up when we were back at UB and head back to the retreat of our guesthouse. But this was our last proper quest. There was no way we would be giving up now, even if our bodies were tired and our minds were yearning for a break from exploring unknown paths. At 6 pm the right bus eventually arrived and after a scramble for seats with too many locals we even managed to both sit. Around 8 pm we had finally managed to get into the national park. It was a beautiful sight with the lush green grass, the hills and the many rock formations pocking out of the ground here and there. It was definitely a place of trolls and elves. However, we had not reached our final destination yet. Our ger camp was still elusive to us. The instructions were: take the path north past the turtle rock, then after 20 minutes you'll find it on the left. It took us 20 minutes to find the right turtle rock. From here it was supposed to be easy right? Well there were two paths beyond the turtle rock. One was leading north east, the other north-west. Which one was the right one? We thankfully had another piece of parchment bearing the name of our camp with us which we showed to various locals we found. The first one drove us 20 meters into the wrong direction to tell us that we should ask for wifi at that place. The second and third did point towards north-east. So we headed that way. And really, as the sun set behind the hills, after in total 8 hours of travelling we finally reached our ger camp. It was a beautiful little camp and our ger was luxurious: it had 6 beds, electricity and an fireplace for heating. We had it completely to ourselves. The camp even had running water. Just as we were preparing ourselves some dinner there was a knock at the door and two men entered to put on our fireplace. The atmosphere immediately got even more comfortable. With the crackling of the fire in the background, we still watched an episode of vikings before retiring to bed.

28.6.

We got up in a good mood that day: we had slept in beautiful ger and a day of exploring a beautiful national park lay before us. So we left our camp and started wandering around between the hills and rocks. Our eyes fell on a particular large rock formation on a hill in the middle of the valley. To reach it we had to pass a dangerous swamp in a forest, climb the steep hill and lastly climb the rocks. We had a beautiful view from the top. We stayed there for an hour. Sharing our thoughts about our past adventure and what the future had in store for us. A chapter in our life was about to come to an end and we still had to process what had happened to us throughout the past 268 days. We returned from the rock and made our way back to the large turtle. We had heard two different accounts at what time our return bus would leave: 2pm and 3.30. Learning from yesterdays adventure, we decided to take neither and try our luck convincing someone to take us into their carriage with us. That had worked in the past, in other countries, so why not here. And it was a success! Only 10 minutes after we started waiving at carriages, a local stopped and asked us if we were going to the city. Due to a lack of common communication skill the drive was quite low on conversation, but as we do appreciate some quiet once in while we did not mind. Our carriage driver dropped us off at a bus stop in the outskirts of the capital of these lands. From there we took two busses back to our inn. In total the way back had taken a bit more than 2 hours.

That evening was an evening of laughs and beautiful conversations for we met our friends Adrian and Justin one more time. They had returned from their tour the North and Gobi that day and we all had so many stories to tell each other. They are truly fascinating people and we had long discussions about what are good places to travel, how to best get into countries you maybe should not travel and what the future had in store for all of us. We hope to see each other again soon, for we will miss them. We had typical Mongolian food and I do have to mention a couple of items we found on the menu: There was the Socialism salad and the mongolian traditional cocktail "vitamin collection". The latter was made out of Blueberry, Mongolian milk and vodka. There was also Banana Ice tea, though we stuck to the traditional milk tea.

29.6.

This was our last full day of our adventure. I would love to tell a very exciting tale about this day, full of adventure. But alas, it was not that exciting. In the morning we went into the National Museum of Mongolia. We had payed our inn with most of our remaining gold, so we had hoped to pay with the invisible method of transfering gold. Most places in this large settlement accept this form of payment. Sadly, the museum was not one of them. It became clear soon, that our remaining cash was not enough to cover for two adult tickets. Though after a bit of confusion the lady at the counter handed us two tickets and took our last remaining tugrik. She had apparently given us one child ticket and one adult ticket. Happy how this turned out we ventured into the museum, learning more about Chinggis Khan, traditional Mongolian clothing and how the country became a democracy. In all honesty, I have to say that Mongolia is a truly impressive country. It's two neighbours are the most powerful communist states on this planet and it managed to peacefully separate from the Soviet Union and establish a working parliamentary democracy. Out of the museum we headed to the market of all things as we planned to get cheap instant noodles for the last time. This was a day of a lot of last times and we had thought a while about what we wanted to eat. So after some unknown cheap hotpot instant noodles and a small productive break we wandered off once more to get some unrecognisable cheap icecream. Also something we got often on this trip. We walked through the streets of Ulaanbaatar, with our "strolling through Berg with Sid" playlist in our ears reminiscent of our past months. For dinner we went back in time to our travels through Usbekistan for we found a place that sells plov. Plov is one of these dishes I have never seen before this trip, but absolutely loved it. I was afraid that I would never eat it again once we left Kazakhstan but here it was again. The version we found missed some essential ingredients (raisins and chickpeas) though it still had the typical Plov taste, so we were content. After one last stroll through the surrounding areas we retreated into our inn to pack our few belongings as we were to rise early the next morning.

Today we were picked up by a driver who whisked us away to the nest of metal birds. Everything went smoothly and now we are sitting in a metal eagle, flying back. I still cannot and also do not want to believe that this adventure is over. I will never forget the absolute freedom and self-confidence it gave us. I hope we can hold on to all the lessons we learned about ourselves, other peoples and the world. Thank you all for reading this and keeping up with our crazy story. We are looking forward to seeing all of you soon!

Lots of Love,

Artey & Sesy