Day 53 - Mongolia Tour. Karakorum Ancient Capital City

Day 14 On Tour.

Overnight the 4 dogs owned by the nomadic families barked excessively loud & consistently.
The noise mixed with the cold night air made for an interrupted sleep. We had an early breakfast & said goodbye to the goats & the 3 friendly dogs. The 4th dog is an aggressive bitch that is kept tied up.
The house wife (a formality used by our tour guide to name the wife) of the nomadic family is coming with us in the van to the nearby city. She is pregnant & needs to see the doctor. One of the few negatives to a nomadic lifestyle is having to travel, sometimes great distances, to receive health care.
While driving, our driver sees a large crack in the earth, where the water a few feet under the soil had frozen solid, expanding & forcing the soil to crack upwards. He explained it had happened recently. We drove off the road & took some pictures of it.

It takes us a few hours on a bitumen road to reach the city, a pretty uneventful drive. Once at the city, we drop the house wife off & then have lunch at a restaurant. One of the best restaurant lunches we have had! Tom & I share, ordering 2 different meals to maximize experience & satisfaction. This also prevents food FOMO (Fear of missing out). We get a Mongolian Pasta & a Kimchi stir fry. 

We soon arrive at Karakorum, the old ancient capital city. We go to the Museum & learn a small but fascinating amount about Mongolias history. Mostly to do with the unification of Mongolias Nomadic tribes, an accomplishment of Chenghis Khan earning him world recognition. It is fascinating to see maps of the Mongolian empire change throughout the various dynasties. At one point the Mongolian Empire is a huge section of the world & had encroached on territories of China, Hindu countries, Russia & Europe. We also learnt the history of Karakorum, which was the ancient capital before it was moved to Beijing. Some time after that, the Chinese took back Beijing & destroyed any evidence of Mongolia. This act meant a lot of Mongolian history was destroyed in Beijing, coupled with the huge & constantly changing empire meant a lot of history was lost throughout the world. It's sad that such a huge country can confirm so little about their history. 

After the Museum, we visit the Buddhist temple. Arriving just after 4.30pm, we didn't get a lot of time in the temple before it closed at 5pm. What we did see was 6 different Buddhist prayer halls, each containing multiple statue buddhas, offerings & paintings. Undra, also explained about the 10 Buddhist protectors, these are the scary looking buddhas. There is 9 men & 1 women protector, she explained a story about the women protector who was sent to destroy an evil Devil. She seduces him & then kills him, later giving birth to his child that she also kills as it leaves her womb. A lot of her paintings show her sitting on a horse with a mutilated body hanging between her legs & blood dripping around her. The paintings of the Male protectors depict similar gore with them standing on bad people & crushing them.

We also visit an active temple with monks in robes reciting the tibetan prayers to Mongolian believers who have sought them out. The monks chanting is very loud & fast, with strong syllables, the noise rising & falling with emphasis. At first it sounded funny, the only thing I can compare it to is the sales pitch of an American auctioneer chant. After I overcome my initial reaction it was captivating & difficult not to stare. It's hard to believe someone's tongue can move so fast, seemingly with no errors in pronounciation. The people receiving the prayers sat in front of the monks, their eyelids glued shut, hands clasped in front. One women was crying from the affect of the prayer & the strength of her belief. 

The afternoon of our last full day flies by, we arrive at our tourist camp accommodation & are shown to our ger. I am delighted to find out about wifi & hot showers. I waste no time in having a shower, washing my hair & then sending Mum a message. The first time I've been able to do both of those things in 14 days. Surprisingly my hair does not stink, with minimal sweating from the cold climate & I have been taking extra time to comb my hair in an attempt to distribute oil from my scalp to the rest fo my hair. I manage to send my mum & a few close friends a message before the wifi becomes too slow to use. Thankfully, I find out that while I was washing my hair Tom was able to call his Mum & wish her a happy birthday via FB. We missed a couple of good friends birthdays while in the Mongolian wilderness, which is always slightly saddening. 

After we give up on the wifi we walk back from the common area to the ger, only to discover that the central stove/fireplace had been started. The stove, I realise with dismay is one of the new ones that are good at radiating lots of heat. The ger is suffocatingly hot, the temperature outside not warranting a fire at all. I immediately close of the fireplace air vents, choking out the fire & open the ger door which stays open for a few hours while I read. Unfortunately this does little to stop the heat that is still radiating from the fireplace. Wearing our underwear & lying on top of our sleeping bags does little to alleviate the discomfort & we awake every hour, sliding around on top of our sleeping bags in a sweaty mess. Several times during the night I open the ger door to let the air out & stand outside in the cold night air. Leaving the door open should have provided the answer to our problem, but it created a new problem by allowing biting insects into our ger.

It's a real shame our last night on tour, sleeping in a ger was the most uncomfortable.

- Alli