Central Mongolia

I was depressed. I was looking forward to the aimag capital of Tsetserleg. There is a British-run restaurant there that serves pizza and fresh cinamon buns. The only bread we had been able to find outside of UB had been hard and stale. I was tired of stale bread.

But we arrived on a saturday, the day after the Nadam festival. The restaurant was closed. So too was the museum I wanted to see, and the state department store, and most of the vendors at the container market. For the prettiest aimag capital, the town was deserted.

At the handful of stalls that were open at the market, I was able to buy two tomatoes (the other seven were rotten) and two packets of instant ramen noodles. We didn't need cooking oil, motorcycle parts, choco-pies, or candy. We were able to find some fresh loaves of bread at one store John was ellated. I was still depressed.

The scenery outside the city, or alpine forests, wild flowers and meadows couldn't even lift my spirits. All I could think about was the five hours of hellish roads we had ahead of us to get to the National Park we were headed for. Our driver was like the Engergizer Bunny; ready as always to slam the doors and crank over the engine. I, on the other hand, needed several days in one place to re-juice.

By the evening I felt a bit better. We hadn't made it all the way to the park. I'd had enough bouncing after 4 hours and we pulled over at the edge of a large gorge. John and I picked a camping spot at the bottom, packed our backpacks and headed down leaving Buyan behind at the top.

There couldn't have been a more perfect setting. It was exactly what I needed - high canyon walls, a rapid, clean river, green grass, dozens of cliff swallows and an eagle soaring overhead.

We set up our tent right on the sand, cooked dinner in a windscreen of rocks. It wasn't lasagne or pizza; it wasn't even the instant pea soup and tomatoes I had planned since I forgot the pea soup in the van, but it didn't matter. We were the only people in the world at that moment. The sun was shining on our backs and those rough Mongolian roads were somewhere else, far away. It didn't even matter that at 3 am in the morning, the wind ripped out our tent stacks and sent us scrambling to re-located higher up on the grass. I forgot about Tsetserleg and felt renewed.

7/15/01

Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur National Park is beautiful. It is ringed by extinct volcano cones and contains an enormous volcanic lake complete with a sandy beach. This was the place where I was going to relax. I didn't want to see our van for at least three days.

We met two Germans while camping there. They invited us to their jeep for tea and whiskey. They teach German in UB and were on a four week trip to western Mongolia. "Did you hear that Janet?" John said. "They bought a jeep and are navigation through Mongolia by themselves." This renewed John's interest in buying a van and going it alone. "Next time that's what we're doing," he announced.

The hiking in the park was gorgeous. The jackets and long johns that never made it out of our packs in the Gobi were in full use as the high winds ripped across the mountain tops. The weather was unpredictable here. We had seen glorious sun followed by sudden rain storms. "We'd better take our jackets," John said as we headed out for a trek up the mountain side.

The view from the top was dramatic. The lake was behind us, the valley we had come from on one side and another, with a river that squiggled for kilometers, on the other. John looked up at the sky and the dark mass that was forming in front of us, "Uh oh. We better get off this peak."

Within minutes the sky boomed with thunder. We didn't stop moving. We bounded down a gully toward the valley. "John, it's hailing," I yelled. The hail came at us in pellets that stung our hands. Then lightening cracked the sky. "Don't walk next to me," John said. "If we get hit by lightening then we both go." That was encouraging.

The hail pellets increased to hail peas. Our pants were drenched and they sank lower around our ankles. We were still a long way from the van and I wondered if I would completely lose them before we made it back.

"Look, the van," John yelled. Butar to the rescue. For a vehicle I never wanted to see again, I was very glad it was there. We piled in and made instant puddles on the floor.

The hail continued for 40 minutes. Marbles and then grapes fell from the sky. We couldn't talk over the rattle on the roof. Butar pointed to the mountain we had hiked. It was white. The lake was sizzling with the beating it was taking. I'd never seen anything like it. Then, all of a sudden it stopped. The lake was calm again, the air wa still, the sun came out. The hills returned to green and the story I planned to tell of our narrow escape seemed a tall tale. But it happened, really it did. I was there.