Leaving from UB... at last!

  UlanBator-Karakorum, Mongolia
Thursday, June 8, 2006

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In the morning, Xavier is already gone to try get his luggage from the airport. Liv leaves too to her trip in the Gobi. At around 9, it is our turn to say goodbye to our host Gana. We catch a taxi to Dragon Center, 6km away. There we find loads of minibuses, but none to Tsetserleg. Great. After lenghty discussions, and after trying out diverse options, we finally decide to get on a minibus to Karakorum, 120 km away from Tsetserleg. With all our stuff, we pay for 4 and take the back seat. One thing that must be specified is that there can be as much as 20 persons in a minibus designed for 12. 3 seats are ok for 4 persons, and children don't pay because they travel on someone else's knees.

We leave from UB at 11h30, and quickly we are in the countryside, in the steppes.Horses, grass, a few herds of sheeps or goats, gers here and there. After a couple of hours we stop at a ganz on the side of the road. Most of the passengers go and eat a meal, rice and goulash from what I saw.


In this "town", made up of a few dozen houses along the road, the only agitation was the car/jeep/bus passing every 2-3 minutes, which is quite a lot of traffic for a mongolian road. Other than that, only the wind, sand whirlwinds, dark birds, a portal squeaking occasionally with the wind.

And off we go again. Somnolents, sleeping as possible with the bumps in the road and the violent yaws the driver was making to avoid them. We drive through sand lanscapes, then steppe again, mountains on the north and south horizons.


In Karakorum, we try out the Crown Cafe, Xavier's friend guesthouse, and a very good place to eat acording to the guide. But it is closed. The driver takes us to a guesthouse where we drop our bags in a ger. Loking for the post office, we go past the Crown Cafe, and notice some activity in the backyard. There we meet Olivier, who thinks at first that we are some 100 dollars a day tourists he's expecting. We explain that Xavier told us of the place, and there he goes on about how many people knowing Xavier he has seen that day... There shouldn't be that many, so we ask to see these people. In Olivioer's ger we find Andy and Andy, our two comrades from UB. They are separated from their tour for a couple of days, and that gives us that excellent opportunity to get some beers and to hear about their last few days with european and mongolian musicians.

We also explained our objectives to Olivier and Pujee, his Mongolian friend, and indeed they could help us buy some horses at a reasonable price. Keeping that in mind, we still decide to head for Tsetserleg the next day, as we have someone to contact there.

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