N
o ger for us to sleep in tonight. Instead, the plan was to find ourselves a Mongolian family that we could dine and *bunk* in with....our opportunity to *bond* with a local family. Actually, the plan was to share a meal with them and while they snoozed in the comfort of their gers, we would be camping it....tents and sleeping bags would be our rooms and beds for the night! At lunch time, Adam collected a few tugrik from each of us which Puji used to buy some food supplies for dinner that night. The idea would be to give the supplies to the family and convince them to cook a meal for us. I don't know why anybody would want to cook for 20 strangers but maybe this is Mongolian hospitality. I'm game for anything.
We spent the afternoon bouncing around in our SUVs over the Mongolian steppe. I was quickly getting used to our travel routine.
Anyway, by late afternoon, we had to start looking for a family to spend our night with. We arrived into what looked like a riverside camp. First, we had to cross a fairly rickety looking wooden bridge though as we would find out later on, this was a very stable bridge by Mongolian standards! This one looked like it was floating on a series of ferry bottoms, if that makes sense. Anyway, the SUVs managed to cross the bridge without any difficulty.
There were a couple of gers in the camp and it definitely looked like there were people there. Puji approached the family and after a few minutes, she came back and told us that they had graciously declined our offer to be our hosts for the night. See? I was right. No one, with any degree of sanity, would want to play host to 20 strangers.
But the area around the camp was so pretty that we decided we would try to set up camp nearby.
Puji and the drivers found us the perfect spot and our first task of the day was to pitch our tents. I left Violeta have the honor of setting up ours :-) It had been many years since she had put up a tent but how hard could it be? After all, we deal with difficult technical IT issues everyday and she is an engineer by training :-)
I went to gather our tent from the SUV and handed it over to Violeta. She dumped all the parts out on the ground.
Everything spilled out onto the ground. The look on her face was priceless. Where to begin?? Luckily, before she had a chance to struggle (and she would have), our driver came over to help out.
Of course, since I was holding the camera to record the moments, I couldn't help out so Violeta did all the work :-)
Here's a slideshow of Violeta and our driver pitching up our tent. The background music is traditional Mongolia khoomi.
With our driver helping out, Violeta got our tent set up in no time. After the tent was erected, she then had to lay out the sleeping bags and inflate the pillows that came with each sleeping bag. Once it was all set up, we realized we had a really teeny, weeny pup tent. Our first challenge was to figure out how to get ourselves and all our gear inside. Surprisingly, we were able to fit everything in and still have room for us to sleep. Tight quarters but cozy. Of course, no one else was as lucky as we were to have help so it took longer for the others to get their tents propped up. Eventually, everyone, except for poor Adam whose tent kit was missing one of the supports, did manage to get their tents pitched and sleeping bags laid out. Adam caved in and decided to sleep under the stars....brave man as who knows what kind of creatures wander about the grounds in the dark.
After breakfast, we packed up our gear, the food and ourselves back into the SUVs. Back on the road.....next destination.....somewhere on the Mongolian steppe!