Terkhun Tsagaan Nuur - The White Lake

  Central Mongolia, Mongolia
Thursday, April 10, 2008

The toilet and our 1st ger camp in the backround

I am now heading into the Mongolian heartland, a classic landscape consisting of hundreds of miles of rolling hills, steppe, occasional forest and several volcanoes (one of which I climbed up and into). The first day we drove for hundreds of miles (east) with the landscape dramatically changing from golden sandy plains to snow covered hills and mountains. For the first couple of hours there was a single bumpy road with lots of pots holes and cracks. Soon after thought the road just disappeared and occasionally reappeared from no where until it

Yaks

eventually did not reappear. We were left with just a bumpy, dusty sand road and a view for miles, every couple of hours we would see some kind of ger settlement and possible a local nomad of horseback. We also saw the only last truely wild horses on earth. We arrived just before nightfall in the middle of nowhere and stayed with a local nomadic Mongol family in there ger.
In the morning we were woken by the sound of sheep and goats (which were so loud, I thought they were attacking out ger). The Mongol family, including

Rounding up the sheep and goats in the morning

the small children were trying to heard all of them into a fenced off area, we decided to help! After all chasing sheep and goats around we managed to get then all into the fenced area, the family then separated all of the sheep and goats, leaving just the lambs and kids in the fenced area, they did not speak any English so we can only assume, so they would not drink all of the parents milk which the family wanted for themselves.
After a couple of nights in the middle of nowhere and long days driving, we made it to the White Lake. Now in a very remote part of Mongolia there is a considerable risk of the Bubonic Plague (black death), not much to worry about though, it only wiped out one third of Europe during the middle ages. Luckily there is a now a very effective drug called streptomycin (or tetracycline) which must be injected

Me

intramuscularly which it not to much of a problem, but guess what, nowhere in the whole of Mongolia has either, and the untreated disease has a 60% death rate. If you manage to dodge this then you just have to watch out for the families dogs, which actually chase and bark at the car of approach (very inviting) and are more than often not, rabid and vicious. Now you've made it past the rabid dogs and plague you can just sit down and enjoy some nice local food in the ger, just don't forget to watch out for Brucellosis

Our Ger in the morning

which you can get from sheep, camels and yak......guess what's for dinner, mutton and un-boiled yaks milk! If you are still alive just remember not to sleep as if the fire goes out you could get hypothermia as the temperature plummets to 20 degrees below 0 at night.
On my free day on the lake, I went got up for sunrise and went on a trek with Alain, I guy in the Swiss army mountaineers. We walked for mile across the frozen lake, up to the highest peak we could see, we then traversed across the mountain, to a couple of other peaks, back across the lake and to peak nearer to the camp for sunset, the views and scenery were breathtaking!