Lake kovsgol
Trip Start
Jul 21, 2008
1
8
23
Trip End
Ongoing
Ulan Bator,
Mongolia
Thursday, August 21, 2008
we woke up to a very chilly morning, then set off to find somebody who spoke a bit of english to try and book a boat ticket to take us for a tour around some of the lake, with a bit of luck we found someone who works near the the place we are staying, he points us in the right direction and gives us a time to be there, it was all a bit confusing as it turns out that the boat seats 4 so it will be expensive but if we can find 15 people it will be a lot cheaper?! "in total we havent seen 15 people in 2days" so how we were going to manage this i had no idea, so we carried on towards the dock ( 30min walk ) and we find a 4 seat tour boat with no one in charge, luckily our driver turns up to give us a hand ( great, just what we need, another person who can't speak english ) but with the help of a calculator? we manage to work out how much the boat trip would be, the total each for one hour is 25.000t this s about £16 each , very expensive
Horses in front of mountains
. so we carry on walking down the lake where there is a bigger boat when I say bigger, I mean an old russian ferry, it turns out that this is a 3hour tour for 6000t which is £2.40 much more like it.we get on board and wait until 12.00 oclock when the ferry departs when all of a sudden every mongolian tourist turns up and the ferry is delayed for 1hour, they are all very excited about their first ever boat trip.
When we are one hour in to our cruise the captain shuts down the engine and makes some announcements on his megaphone. He is talking for some time before I realise that no one is driving the boat and we are slowly drifting towards the shore, but no one seems bothered so why should I care, after all, there aren't any liferafts apart from the one that is padlocked up by the dock we just left.
when he finishes his speech he points towards a big green rock and everyone strats to pray " it turns out that its some kind of wishing rock" so I wish for pizza, and Helen wishes that she gets back safely! after all the prayers are said "and still to this day we will ever understand what happend next" but the whole boat turned into a disco boat and everyone strated to drink and dance to some very old techno music, this for us was hillarious.
mongolian disco dancers
while all this was going on we decided to take a look around the ferry, OH! how we are pampered in the UK with health and safety! the engine room was wide open so I went in for a look, all along the deck were loads of sharp metal ropes just lying around, but the best thing was the sketchy ladders that went down from one deck to the next, it was very scary watching the drunk people trying to climb down these.when we returnd to the dock safley ( Helens wish came true ) we headed back for some lunch when we took a slight detour and walked past a place called "garage 24 " it looked like a hostel so we went in to get a cup of tea, had a look at the menu and we saw pizza....... so merlins wish came true. So maybe there was something to all this "party boat malarky!"
Comments
pizza's and boat party
Once again,Hi!, and thank you, great time you must be having, so exciting and funny. Look forward to the next one. Lots of Love, Ken and Jeanne xxx.