A Merry Mongolian Holiday Season, Part 2 (Hiking Through the Snow)

After all the Shine Jil parties, actual New Year’s Day was the following week, and I celebrated by waking up super early to climb a mountain and watch the first sunrise of the new year! Why, you ask? Because I’m crazy!

Or, it’s a tradition in Uliastai for (seriously dedicated) people to hike to the top of the tallest mountain surrounding the town, in the freezing, pitch black, wee hours of the morning to catch the first glimpse of the sun peeking over the horizon to ring in the new year. And I’m crazy.

I remembered some of my coworkers mentioning the event the year before, and me thinking how nice it would be to NOT do that and instead stay bundled up in my warm sleeping bag and down comforter all morning. But this year, I spent almost all of New Year’s Eve trying to decide whether or not to go. It would be my last chance to do so, and I did check the weather to find it was “only” getting down to -5 degrees F (-20 degrees C), which is quite bearable if properly dressed, and nothing like the -20 degrees F (-29 degrees C) it was just a few days before and after.

So I told my supervisor I was gonna go! Originally the plan had been to head to the mountain at 4am, but then it became 6am. Okay, whatever, the sun doesn’t rise here in winter until well after 9am, but I had attempted to climb this mountain with my sitemates back in the summer (when it wasn’t covered in a foot of snow) and had gotten 3/4 of the way up before they insisted that we go back down. I don’t remember how long it took us to get that 3/4 of the way up, but I trusted my Mongolian friends knew how much time it would take.

I was all ready to leave at 6am and headed out of my khashaa to wait for my supervisor and her boyfriend to pick me up. But they were late. I tried calling both of their phones, but got no answer. After 45 minutes, I went back into my ger, stripped off my outerwear, made another fire, and got ready to go back to sleep, thinking that the hike wasn’t gonna happen. Then at around 7:20am, my supervisor called me to say they were heading to my home. I asked her if it was really worth it at this point, if we really had time to make it to the top of the mountain before the sunrise. She insisted we did, so I frantically threw my layers back on and ran out to meet them. Apparently the car hadn’t started, which in winter in Mongolia means you have to blowtorch the engine until it unfreezes. Seriously. That had taken about an hour, but now we were off!

We drove to the base of the mountain, I put on my headlamp so I could see where the heck I was going, and promptly left my supervisor and her boyfriend behind (sorry, but they were going too slow, and I was not gonna miss the sunrise that I woke up early just to see). I soon realized just how much effort it took to trudge uphill through the snow and had to stop for breaks quite often. But because I was racing against the clock, I couldn’t take many real breaks that involved actually sitting down and taking a sip of water; I would get as much ground covered as I felt possible before collapse, then stop (still standing) and take a few deep breaths for maybe 10-15 seconds, then push on again.

Disclaimer: I highly advise against hiking a mountain in this fashion. You should obviously pace yourself and not be a lunatic dead-set on reaching the summit by a certain time.

Who you calling a lunatic?

It started getting light before I reached the top, but the sun rises on the opposite side of the mountain from where we were hiking, so I couldn’t be sure whether I was too late or not until I did get to the top. Which, according to the time stamp my camera has for the first photo I took on the summit, was at 9:10am. So I had somehow made it up in just over 1.5 hours.

Up through that

As the following video shows, I originally thought I had missed the sunrise, until everyone else at the top started shouting:

But nope! I had made it just in time!

There were plenty of other people who had made the hike:

But my supervisor and her boyfriend didn’t make it to the top until about 20 minutes later, after which we gave milk offerings and took more photos.

It was obviously very cold and windy on top of the mountain, so after snapping a bunch of photos, eating a snack, and waiting to see if we had won a raffle (we didn’t), it was time to head back down to Uliastai.

Way down there

We were one of the last groups to leave, so the path back down was basically deep trenches through the snow, which in some parts were so smooth that it was easier to just sit down and slide than try to walk!

When I finally got home, I was so exhausted I slept for almost 6 hours, but the experience had definitely been worth it!

 

On another note, due to one of sitemates having to go to UB for medical for a few weeks, we had to postpone our Zavkhan Christmas celebration until well into January. Even then, 2 of our sitemates couldn’t come at the last minute due to being sick or transportation issues, but the 4 of us girls enjoyed a day full of watching movies, playing cards, and eating all the good food (cinnamon rolls for breakfast, turkey and stuffing for lunch [turkey courtesy of the US Embassy in UB], and spaghetti and meatballs for dinner). And then the long holiday season was over, only for Tsagaan Sar to be right around the corner in February!

MST, and Other Happenings from the Past Few Weeks

After PST was over and all the new PCVs had gone off to their sites, I went to UB to await my cohort’s Mid-Service Training (MST). There was only a week between the M26s’ PST and our M25 MST, and Peace Corps sure as hell wasn’t going to pay for any of us fly-site people to take a plane trip back to site for a few days just to turn around and head right back again. So I literally hung out in UB for a week. Which sounds great, except I had to foot the bill for almost everything (and staying in UB is expensive!), even though Peace Corps hadn’t really given me any other options. I did get reimbursed for a couple of those days, as I had to be in UB for my mid-service medical and dental exams and could write them off as “medical travel,” but I still ended up having to spend a lot of money to stay at the hostel and buy the overpriced food of the big city. Luckily, I had plenty of money saved up (as there’s not much to buy in a small town in the middle of nowhere), so I decided to take advantage of my free time and go all out!

…By which I mean I went around to a bunch of the touristy sites in and around UB. Yes, I know how to party.

My first stop was Gandantegchinlen Monastery, a large Buddhist monastery smack dab in the middle of the city.

That building on the left houses a statue of the boddhisattva Avalokiteśvara (which likely means nothing to you if you’re not Buddhist), which is apparently the tallest indoor statue in the world, at 87 ft (26.5 m).

The next day, I went to the southern part of the city to visit the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan and the Zaisan Memorial. The Winter Palace was one of the four residences of the 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu (spiritual head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism) who later became the emperor of Mongolia (the Bogd Khan) when it declared independence from the Qing dynasty of China in 1911. The Bogd Khan was the theocratic ruler of Mongolia until his death in 1924, after which the communist government of the Mongolian People’s Republic came into power.

Anyway, now the palace is a museum and tourist attraction. I was able to get some pictures of the outside of the buildings, but they had a strict “no photography” policy inside, so I have no photos of all the cool stuff the museum had, like the fancy jeweled decorations worn by the Bogd Khan’s pet elephant (because of course he had a pet elephant).

On the way to my next stop, I saw a giant Buddha statue…

…and then made it to the base of the Zaisan Memorial hill. The memorial honors Soviet soldiers killed during World War II, and at the base of the hill is a tank memorial, featuring a Soviet tank sponsored by Mongolia and that participated in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.

It even comes with a map of its journey from Moscow to Berlin

Then I climbed a bunch of steps to the top of the hill, where the main memorial is.

There’s a circular painting depicting scenes of friendship and support between Mongolia and the Soviet Union:

This scene shows Soviet support for Mongolia’s declaration of independence

Here’s the defeat of the Japanese by a joint Mongolian/Soviet effort during a border conflict in 1939

And here’s the defeat of Nazi Germany

and the hill offered a great view of UB:

There was also a guy with an eagle that you could pay 3,000 tugriks ($1.50) to hold and get pictures taken, so of course I did that:

The following day, two guys at the hostel and I decided to take a tour to Gorkhi-Terelj National Park and to the Chinggis Khaan Equestrian Statue.

Gorkhi-Terelj National Park is one of the most famous and scenic of Mongolia’s national parks. It’s not too far from UB, so it’s a really popular tourist destination. We were only doing a day trip, so we didn’t get to see much of the park (it’s pretty damn big), but we went on a hike up to a monastery, which had an amazing view.

We ate lunch, then went off to see “Turtle Rock.”

After our brief trip to the park, we headed to the Chinggis Khaan Equestrian Statue (I refuse to spell it your silly, wrong way, Wikipedia).

Which is literally a giant steel statue of Chinggis Khan on a horse

You could even go up inside the statue and walk out on the horse’s head, in order to get face-to-face with Chinggis…

He’s always watching…

Or to look out at the (quite underwhelming, especially after Terelj) surrounding view:

After checking out the statue and the museum underneath it, we went back to the hostel for a nice rest.

Finally, it was time for MST. It was held at the same resort that the PDM workshop had been held at back in April, about an hour outside of UB. MST was the first time some of us had seen each other in a year, since Health and CYD had a separate IST from the TEFL group. It was a time to reflect on our first year of service and to look ahead and plan for our second year. We also had a few Mongolian language classes, as well as our second Language Proficiency Interview (LPI). Our first LPI–basically a 30-minute discussion with a Mongolian teacher used to rate your level of language proficiency–was at the end of PST last summer. I was pretty nervous about how this LPI would go. I had done well on my first one, but that was after a summer of 4-hour Mongolian classes every weekday. I fell out of the habit of studying soon after I got to site, and even though I obviously have to speak a ton of Mongolian at site, it’s always in the same situations (shopping for groceries, taking a taxi, at work at the health department, etc.), so my vocabulary has probably decreased. In any case, I have one more LPI to look forward to, at our COS conference next spring!

MST was Monday through Friday, and then it was (finally) back to Uliastai on Saturday. My ger had been reconstructed (after it was taken down to replace the wooden floor at the beginning of the summer), but for whatever reason my electricity hadn’t been reconnected, so I without power for the first 4 days I was back. It also rained almost every day that first week back, so I quickly discovered that my ger floods from rainwater seeping in along the floor (an issue which I’m still working to get resolved). And there was the general unpacking of all my belongings that I had to pack up right before they took my ger down. So it’s been kinda stressful.

But the weekend after that stressful week was filled with hanging out with my sitemates, including our new M26. On Friday evening, we got together to make dinner and to discuss our plans for community projects for the next year (community English classes, “Monglish” nights, benefit concert 2.0, and several new projects that are in the works–so stay tuned!).

Then on Saturday we went on our first hike of autumn (though how many more we’ll be able to go on before winter hits is questionable, considering it’s already getting below freezing at night).

Our destination: that cliff

Why yes, I do live in one of the most beautiful places in Mongolia

View of Uliastai

The ladies of Zavkhan (photo credit to Travis, who’s so lucky to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with us)

Spring Has Sprung!

After roughly 7 months of winter, it looks like spring has finally arrived here in Uliastai! And by “arrived,” I mean one week it was still frigid with sub-zero temperatures during the night, and the next I could comfortably walk around town with jeans and a thin long-sleeved shirt. Now I only have to make a small fire in my stove in the morning to get the chill out from the night before and maybe a small fire late in the evening depending on how long I plan to stay up. I somehow still have over half of my firewood left, probably because it was a relatively “mild” winter by Mongolian standards. The sun doesn’t set until almost 10pm, so even accounting for daylight saving time, that’s an extra 3-4 hours of light during the evening. But unfortunately, the warmer weather means my ger spiders have come back. Stupid spiders.

Most of the snow on the surrounding mountains has melted…

…and some parts of the rivers have completely thawed as well.

Although the rivers are still frozen in some parts, given that 2 feet of ice takes a while to melt

The weather was even nice enough yesterday for us to go on our first hike of spring!

Those white splotches are ice on the still-frozen parts of the rivers

Top-of-the-mountain photo with perfectly-timed bird soaring behind me

It was a nice little excursion, but I didn’t even think about how my ghost-white skin would react to seeing the sun for the first time in over half a year. I remembered to put sunscreen on my face and neck, but completely forgot about my arms. So now they’re sunburned. 😦

Hair-Cutting, Hiking, and Halloween

A few weeks ago I got to go to my second Mongolian hair-cutting ceremony. Now, I already talked a little about hair-cutting ceremonies in my post about the first one I went to over the summer, but I didn’t get any pictures at that ceremony, so I made sure to take plenty of photos at this more recent one.

During the hair-cutting

During the hair-cutting

This ceremony was for the son of a Mongolian woman who is good friends with all the PCVs in Zavkhan and speaks amazing English.

Getting the rest of his hair shaved off

The finished product

 

I’ve also gone on two more hikes since my last post (gotta get as many in as possible before winter starts!). The first was with a few other PCVs and a few Mongolian friends.

On our way back we found a bunch of baby yaks, so of course I had to pet one

We also passed by a small temple

 

The second hike was with two other PCVs and a large group of students from the Adult Beginner’s English Class we recently started up.

 

We even had a random dog from town follow us for the entire 5-hour hike

And because none of us knew where we were going, we ended up choosing a route down the mountain that quickly became more rock-climbing than hiking

Let’s just say it was too steep for the dog to even climb down, so we may have had to carry her part of the way

And I only fell once! And luckily I managed to break my fall with my arm instead of my head!

Pictured: NOT the easiest way to get down a mountain

 

Finally, each of the schools in town had a Halloween party organized by their respective PCVs. Since I don’t work at a school, I stopped by the party at the school closest to my home to get in on the Halloween spirit.

Complete with a mummy-wrapping race…

…zombie limbo…

…and bobbing for apples.

 

We also had a Halloween-themed lesson for the students in our Bookbridge English classes at the library, where they drew pictures and wrote a paragraph about their “monster family.”

About Zavkhan and Uliastai

I mentioned a while ago that I would talk more about Zavkhan and Uliastai in an upcoming post, and what better time to do that than now?

Zavkhan aimag

Zavkhan is an aimag (province) in the Western part of Mongolia.

Location of Zavkhan (the star represents Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia)

I previously referred to it as the black hole of Mongolia because of how difficult it is to travel through the region, what with all the mountains and deserts and terribly maintained roads (or lack of roads at all). In fact, the whole Western region of the country is pretty dang remote, so much so that Peace Corps no longer sends Volunteers out to Bayan-Ulgii aimag (the westernmost one) or Uvs aimag (the one to the northwest of Zavkhan) precisely because of how isolated and hard-to-reach PCVs who lived in those provinces before were.

The population of Zavkhan as of 2011 was 65,481, making it the 8th least populous and having the 8th smallest population density (0.79 people/km2) of Mongolia’s 21 aimags (after all those in the Gobi, because who wants to live there?).  Population growth in the aimag actually stopped back in 1994 (at 103,150) and has been steadily decreasing ever since. I guess people don’t like living in a black hole much more than they like living in the Gobi.

It’s a shame really, because Zavkhan is a beautiful place. The terrain ranges from the tall mountains and forests of the Khangai Mountain Range in the east:

including Otgontenger, the highest peak in the range (4,031 m/13,225 ft) and the only one capped with a permanent glacier:

But it’s one of Mongolia’s three most sacred mountains, so don’t even think about climbing it (seriously, it’s forbidden by law)

to the broad steppe of the north:

to the sand dunes of the edge of the Gobi desert in the west and southwest:

…surrounding giant lakes, because screw the desert (BTW, this is Bayan Nuur, or “Rich Lake”)

Who says Mongolia doesn’t have white sandy beaches? (this would be Khar Nuur, or “Black Lake”)

to the Great Lakes Depression in the far west:

No relation to North America’s Great Lakes

Looks like I have a lot of sightseeing to do over the next 2 years!

Zavkhan is often referred to as the coldest aimag in Mongolia, though this is largely due to the fact that it contains a few soums that get much colder than other places. For example, Tosontsengel, the largest soum in Zavkhan after the capital, has recorded temperatures as low as -52.9 degrees C/-63.2 degrees F. And although winters are bitterly cold in Zavkhan, they’re also very dry, so I have very little risk of being buried in a blizzard (freezing to death by other means is still a possibility though).

Uliastai

Uliastai is the aimag center (capital) of Zavkhan. As you can see from this lovely topographic map of Mongolia and all its aimags’ capitals, Uliastai has quite a few mountains surrounding it and between it and Ulaanbaatar (UB):

I had to look up why Russia was labeled “Russland.” This is apparently a German map.

There are buses and meekers (vans) that regularly travel between UB and Uliastai, but considering that’s over 1000 km on unpaved, poorly maintained, mountainous roads, you’re looking at 40-60 hours of bumpy, crowded travel surrounded by a bunch of strangers who will definitely be staring at you–the foreigner–for the entirety of the trip. And you can have this wonderful experience all for the low low price of 48,000 tugriks (about $27)! Or you can travel via the same method we originally arrived in Uliastai–airplane. The airport is about 45 minutes outside the city (as it’s hard to land airplanes in a small valley literally surrounded by mountains), has one unpaved runway, and only has 3 flights a week during summer (2 a week during winter, or “most of the year”). Flights are only 2 hours long, but all this convenience comes with the hefty price tag of about 240,000 tugriks (about $133) one-way. Now, I realize that may not seem too expensive, but remember, we PCVs don’t really get “paid” so much as we get a “living allowance” to pay our rent and utilities and buy food and other stuff we need to–y’know–live. So when a round-trip plane ticket costs  significantly more money than we get in a single month, it is officially “expensive.” Which really sucks when there are literally only flights between Uliastai and UB; if you want to fly to even a neighboring aimag, you actually have to first fly to UB, and then from UB fly to that other aimag.

But if you’re only going to a neighboring aimag, then just take the bus or a meeker! It’ll be a much shorter trip than the ride to UB, so it can’t be that bad, some of you may be thinking. But that’s the problem: there are very, very few meekers (and no buses) that regularly go to and from other places, so your only option is usually to privately hire a meeker driver to take you to your destination, which is expensive as hell unless you have a bunch of friends going with you on your trip to split the cost with. Most aimag centers in the central and eastern regions of Mongolia have many more transportation options, including a freakin’ train! But not us. Such is life in “the black hole.”

Anyway, Uliastai is a city of 15,460 people (as of 2012). Like the rest of Zavkhan, its population has seen a decline in recent years. Back in 2000 its population was 24,276, making it the 10th most populous city in Mongolia, but yeah, not anymore. Yet for some reason, there are at least 4 new apartment buildings currently under construction in the city, so they’re either expecting a whole lot of new residents, or the city has more money than it knows what to do with.

The city experiences a lovely subarctic climate, with “long, dry, very cold winters and short, warm summers.” Pretty much all the precipitation falls between June and August, and I get to look forward to an average of 5.3 hours of sunlight per day come December! So, yeah, if someone wants to send me one of those “happy lights” for an early Christmas present before I succumb to seasonal affective disorder, it would be much appreciated.

Uliastai is–as I mentioned–surrounded by mountains, and it’s located in a river valley where the Chigestai and Bogdiin Gol rivers converge. It is actually one of the oldest settlements in Mongolia, originally founded in 1733 as a military post by the Manchus during the Qing Dynasty’s rule of Mongolia. And despite its modern reputation as one of the most remote aimag capitals in the country, Uliastai was once an important center of caravan trade.

The city doesn’t have much in the way of tourist attractions (as it’s not exactly a tourist hotspot; see “black hole” above), but there are two museums: the Zavkhan Aimag History Museum:

Which has a lovely exhibit showing the torture of Mongolians under the Qing Dynasty (yeah, Mongolians really don’t like China)

and the Museum of Famous People:

which features such people as the first Zavkhan resident to scale Mt. Everest

There’s also a cool pavilion with a bunch of stupas on top of a hill right in the middle of the city, called Javkhlant Tolgoi (literally, “magnificent peak”) that gives a nice view of the city:

and a small Buddhist temple further down on that same hill:

Other than that, there’s not much here except lots of hiking. Not that I mind too much. Living in a small, remote aimag capital like this allows me to experience some of the more traditional aspects of Mongolian life while still having some of the luxuries I wouldn’t find in a soum.

Weekend Hike with My Coworkers (and Escalation of My Illness)

I told you there would be lots of hiking!

The Saturday after my third week in Uliastai, a group of coworkers from the health department and I went hiking. They had invited me earlier in the week, before I was completely exhausted, so I had agreed to go, only to be sore from tons of aerobics and tired from lack of sleep the morning of the hike.

We met up at the health department at 7am before driving over to where we would be hiking. I had originally been told we would be hiking a certain famous mountain right behind the hill my friends and I had climbed two weeks before…

Yeah, that one

…which is apparently the tallest of the mountains surrounding Uliastai. But when we started driving in a different direction, straight through the valley (and all its rivers and streams, at one time getting stuck, because off-roading in a sedan is not the brightest of ideas), I assumed that the plans had changed.

We ended up driving quite far away from town and even part of the way up the mountain we would be hiking, until we ended up here:

You can just barely make out the city way out there in the background

We abandoned the car and finally started up the mountain, which wasn’t too steep at first, until it suddenly was.

Ok, break time!

It was also very cold, as the sun was rising on the other side of the mountain. Which was great for my never-ending cold (as in, the upper respiratory infection). Let’s just say my pockets were stuffed full of tissues for my dripping nose the whole time.

After a while, we came to what I thought was the top of the hill we were climbing, but ended up just being a slightly less steep part of the hill. At least it was pretty with all the trees, and we were finally up in the sun.

When we got to the top of that hill, we could see into the valley on the other side of the mountain, where the Bogdiin River flows into Uliastai.

But we weren’t even close to done yet! Next we had to get up to some weird rock formation!

Onward!

To be honest, I had absolutely no idea where we were going or if anyone else did either. I got the sense that we were just going to keep hiking up and up and up until there was no where left to hike up to.

We had made it up to a grassy hill and someone finally showed me where we were headed:

To that pointy rock formation up there a little to the left. Not only was that the top of the mountain we were on (finally!), but there was an old legend that if that rock formation (which actually has a name: Jinst) ever fell down, the whole city of Uliastai would be flooded. Yay!

And of course, there was an owoo shrine right beside it

From the top of the mountain, Uliastai looked so tiny!

At this point we finally sat down and had a picnic with the food we’d brought.

Mongolian picnic

But with the combination of no longer moving, being on top of a mountain, and, well, being in Mongolia, it was really freakin’ cold! The wind definitely didn’t help either. All of my coworkers laughed at me when I put on the gloves and ear warmers I had packed in my backpack (haha, silly American can’t handle a little sub-freezing windchill without dragging out her gloves!), but I saw them all rubbing their hands together and breathing hot air into them, so I know they were cold too! Just jealous that they didn’t come prepared like me…

Anyway, after eating our food, we wandered around all the cool rock formations and took a bunch of photos:

Eventually we headed back down the mountain, but instead of going down the way we had come up, we decided to go straight down one of the rockiest, steepest parts of the mountain at a ridiculously fast pace, because who couldn’t use a little damage to their knee ligaments?

Come on slowpokes! It only took us 4 hours to get up there, you should be able to come back down in 20 minutes, tops!

When we finally did get back down to where the cars were parked, we found that one of the other health department workers and her daughter had come to bring us more food! Time for a second picnic!

While we were eating, two young boys rode by on a horse, and my coworkers (who knew that I like horses), called these random boys over and asked them if I could ride on their horse. They may have bribed the boys with some of the food we were munching on, but they let me sit on their horse while one of the boys led it around for a while.

Cementing in the young children’s minds that foreigners are a bunch of weirdos

But no Mongolian shindig is complete without vodka! Which our director just happened to have in the trunk of his car! Now, I’m not a fan of vodka unless it’s mixed with something into a cocktail, but we had been warned during PST that vodka would be present at pretty much all Mongolian get-togethers (even those with your boss present) and that it is customary to pass shots around. So of course I was offered a shot, which I begrudgingly took and gagged on.

Finally we piled into the cars to head back to Uliastai. But then we stopped by a random ger in the middle of nowhere to ask–I kid you not–if they had any yogurt. See, traditional Mongolian yogurt can be made with the milk of any livestock, but my coworkers informed me that the best yogurt comes from the animals belonging to the herdsmen out in the countryside. So, seeing a ger in the middle of nowhere, they (correctly) assumed that a herding family must live there and have yogurt at the ready. A couple coworkers went in to ask if they had any fresh yogurt, and when they confirmed that they did, all 10 of us waltzed into this poor random family’s ger to eat their food. As my director told me, it is perfectly acceptable out in the countryside to come to some stranger’s ger and get fed. So the family served us milk tea, bread, and the coveted yogurt and chatted a while until we finally left.

I was quite tired at this point (and still sick), and I thought we were going home, but when we got close to town they pulled over by the river and started dragging blankets and mats out of the cars and laying them on the ground. It was time to play cards!

They proceeded to play a billion rounds of a Mongolian card game that they often play during lunch at the health department. They had tried to teach me how to play before, and did again on this occasion, but for some unknown reason they always assign one of the workers who speaks absolutely no English to teach me, and I’m not one of those people who can learn how to play a card game just by watching other people play it. Every time I thought I was understanding the game, someone would play a card that changed everything.

We eventually started to pack up, until someone remembered that there was food left over from our earlier picnics and–gasp!–we hadn’t finished the bottle of vodka from earlier! So picnic #3 commenced, as well as another round of shots. By now most of my coworkers could tell that I was tired and not feeling so well (did the constantly wiping and blowing my nose tip them off?), so we left very soon after that. I did get one last photo of the mountain that we had climbed though:

Does that itty bitty, barely perceptible rock on the top look familiar?

But yeah, you probably shouldn’t spend an entire day hiking and various other exploits when you’re battling an illness, as I found out when I got much sicker the next week!

First Weekend Hike (Because What Else Are You Gonna Do in a Town Literally Surrounded by Mountains?)

On our first Saturday in Uliastai, two of my sitemates and I went hiking up one of the hills behind Shin Khurul, the neighborhood that one of my sitemates lives in that’s about a 40-minute walk from the center of the city.

At least it’s a nice, scenic walk

After fueling up on PB&J sandwiches (peanut butter is only available in UB or care packages sent from back home, but luckily we had stocked up before heading out to Zavkhan), we decided on a hill. It was already almost noon so we knew we didn’t have time to tackle one of the actual mountains, so we settled on this hill:

Ok, you look taller and rockier up close…

Our “hike” ended up being more rock-climbing in some areas:

And maybe I’m just out of shape, but it was exhausting! I think I’ll blame it on the thin air from the elevation though. Uliastai’s elevation is 5,751 ft (1,753 m), but obviously we were higher up on the hill. And I’m from Atlanta, where the elevation ranges from 738 – 1,050 ft (225 – 320 m), and I had spent the previous two years in New Orleans, which is below sea level in some areas, so I’m gonna make that my excuse.

Finally we approached the top of the hill:

You can tell it’s the top because you can see the blue hadag on the owoo shrine

We stopped to rest and eat a bit before taking a bunch of photos.

Then we headed back down the other, less rocky side of the hill.

It was a lot of fun and I have a feeling I’ll be doing plenty of hiking during my 2 years here!

Daytrip to Amarbayasgalant Khiid (Monastery)

Note: I’m still behind on getting all my blog posts up, but I just wanted to let you all know that we had our Swearing-In Ceremony today in UB, so I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) now! I will be leaving for my permanent site tomorrow, which is the Health Department in Uliastai, the capital of Zavkhan aimag. I will talk more about this once I get fully caught up!

One Saturday in July all 10 of us Health PCTs and one of our LCFs went to visit Amarbayasgalant Khiid, one of the three largest monasteries in Mongolia and the most popular attraction in Selenge aimag, the large province that surrounds our tiny Darkhan-Uul aimag. It was built between 1727 and 1737, but it is still a functioning monastery (about 60 monks live there) although many of the temples and buildings have not been revived after the Soviet purges.

We left around 8am for the 3-hour drive to the monastery. About half the drive was on a paved road, but then we turned off onto a dirt road for the remainder of the trip. As always, the scenery was absolutely beautiful.

The monastery is in the Ivon Gol Valley, surrounded by the Burenkhan Mountains. There’s nothing but a tiny, tiny village around it and hundreds upon hundreds of livestock.

We wandered through the numerous temples and yards of the monastery, trying not to get lost.

We were able to go inside the main temple, where a group of monks was eating lunch, studying, and chanting.

Life-size statue of Rinpoche Gurdava, a lama who raised much of the money for the restoration of the temple in the 1990s

After wandering through the monastery itself, we walked up the hills behind it to a giant Buddha statue:

And a stupa:

That’s a lot of steps…

Apparently this is a stupa, which must be Mongolian for “eyes staring into your soul for all eternity” (it’s not)

Which gave us great views of the monastery and the whole valley.

Ok, I may have hiked a little further up the hill to get an even better view

Owoo shrines

After seeing everything, we ate lunch, then piled back into the meeker for the long ride home. We were all exhausted, but it’s hard to sleep when you’re in a crowded van without seat belts on an insanely bumpy dirt road through the countryside. So I saved my nap for when I got home!

UPDATE: I had gotten a video from inside the main temple of the monastery but wasn’t able to upload it at the time. Now I’ve created a YouTube channel where I’ve been putting all my videos, so you can check it out here.

Mid-Center Days

Beginning on July 2^nd, all of the M25 PCTs came together again in Darkhan for Mid-Center Days, which is another 3 and a half days of Peace Corps training approximately halfway through PST. We stayed at the Darkhan Hotel again (which has wifi in the lobbies! Score!) and had lots of training and informational sessions all day long at the Humanities University. Then in the evenings we had free time to get dinner, go shopping, etc. On one of the nights we had a media exchange to share movies, TV shows, and ebooks between each other’s hard drives. On Thursday all of us Health PCTs and a few of the current Health Volunteers went out to dinner at a restaurant that actually served pizza (which is obviously not available in little Dereven). It was absolutely delicious, and I probably had 5 or 6 slices!

Then Friday was the 4^th of July, so when we went back to the hotel for lunch, we saw that the Peace Corps staff had decorated the dining room with American flags and had gotten the chefs to make us all hamburgers, hotdogs, and French fries!

Then in the evening a group of us went on a “hike” to a big field right outside the city to have a picnic, chat, throw around a Frisbee, kick around a soccer ball, and play with one of the current PCV’s adorable puppy!

Of course a ukelele was involved

View of the city from the field

On Saturday we had a half day of sessions and then headed back to our respective sites. It was really nice to get to see everyone from the other sites, especially since we didn’t see each other again until Final Center Days and Swearing-In in the middle of August. Oh yeah—and on two of the nights we stayed at the hotel there were crazy parties going on until the wee hours of the morning in a giant tent right in the parking lot (which was conveniently on the side of the hotel my room was on…), so we all got very little sleep and barely made it through all the long sessions. As soon as I got back home from Mid-Center Days I took a glorious, much needed 5-hour nap.

The Mongolian Hills Have Eyes (Or, Our Brief Stay at a Ger Camp)

Note: Yet another catch-up post.

As I mentioned in my last post, we spent our first 2 days in Mongolia at a ger camp, which is a tourist camp made up of traditional Mongolian gers. We arrived late at night, so we couldn’t exactly see the scenery, but the next morning, we were greeted by a spectacular view.

Ooooo…!

Aaaaahhhh!

Even though we were literally just a 15 minute drive from Ulaanbaatar (a ginormous* city by Mongolian standards), it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere (in a good way). There were 6 of us in each ger, and the gers themselves were really nice, even though the beds were hard as a rock (I’ve learned that all beds in Mongolia are hard as a rock) and our water heater wasn’t working so showers with anything other than ice cold water were out of the question. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll realize that showers and bathing in general are overrated when your options are a) possible frostbite and b) baby powder for your hair and baby wipes for your body.

Our first meal in Mongolia was your typical breakfast of hotdogs, eggs over easy, corn and pea medley, bread and butter, coffee, and juice boxes.

Seriously

This is obviously not what Mongolians eat for breakfast, so I’m pretty sure the Peace Corps staff just told the workers in the ger camp restaurant to cook up something for 91 Americans. This is pretty much how most of our meals at the ger camp went: slowly easing us into what we would actually be eating for the rest of our time in Mongolia. We had some more meetings, got a couple more vaccinations (like rabies! Yay for rabid animals!), and went to the Immigration Office in Ulaanbaatar for immigration processing (which involves photos and fingerprinting).

We also had a little bit of free time, so some of us went hiking up the beautiful hills surrounding the ger camp.

 

I don’t exactly go hiking much, but I’m not out of shape either, so I’ll blame the fact that I was completely winded the entire time on the high altitude where we were. It was a lot of fun though, I got some great photos of the scenery, and we even found some bones! You read that right: we found 4 different bones scattered around the hillside, hence my oh so clever post title.

 

We determined (or seriously hoped) that they were the bones of some livestock that had died/been killed elsewhere and wolves or rabid stray dogs feasted on their bodies and dispersed the bones throughout the area…**

The view was great though!

*Spell check had nothing to say about my use of “ginormous” and even offered synonyms, so I’m left to believe that it’s an actual word.

**I’ve since learned that there’s just random bones everywhere here. Mongolians eat a lot of meat, and most of it is straight off the bone, so when they toss the bones the stray dogs just get to them and carry them all over the place.