The Gobi!

We've found the Gobi you see in movies! With a week of rain, much of the Gobi is in flower, green from horizon to horizon. Today, though, we came to the Seruun Bulag sand dunes—100km X 12km of soft, fine, blowing sand. Our group, minus four of us who went part way up and then watched, climbed to the top of one of the highest dunes and back down. Some Korean tourists after us hiked up with red plastic sleds, but they stayed at the top for dinner or snacks, so we didn't get to see them slide down.

While I was watching the climbers from a lower dune, a group of horses trotted out onto the sand and started rolling on their backs in evident delight. I'm sure it helps clean their fur and relieve the nuisance of flies.

We've spent a LOT of time in our vehicles the last several days. First we drove several hours, much of the time on non-road trails across rocky ground to Karakorum. We spent two nights there at the Tenger Blue Sky ger camp. The first morning, after viewing the city from a high hill near our camp, we visited the Erdene Zhu Monastery, built in the 1580s, destroyed by Soviets in the 1930s, and now a museum with a small community of monks. Karakorum was the capital of the Mongolian empire under Ghengis Khan, and the city stood where the monastery ruins are now. As we learned later at the Karakorum museum, the imprints of the layout of the 13th Century city are still visible from the sky, and can be seen on Google Maps. The city contained quarters for Muslims with a mosque, for Christians with a church, for Jews with a synagogue, and for nomads with a cluster of gers. Government functionaries, diplomats from across Asia and Europe, warriors, and Mongolian families all rubbed shoulders in the great city. After lunch, we visited a local calligraphy center to learn more about Mongolian script and calligraphy. After amost 100 years of writing Mongolian in Cyrillic letters, the country is reverting to the ancient script used from the 12th century to 1920. It's written from top to bottom, left to right, and is beautiful.

Tuesday was to be our biggest driving day. We drove 175 miles, six hours, on Sunday over incredibly bumpy roads and eventually on trackless steppe to the Secret of Ongi Ger camp. It's the rainy season, and storms had played havoc with the tracks. We bounced and slid through gullies and washes all day. Toilet breaks were at random, on the steppe or in the desert; women walked one way and squatted in full view of the vans while men turned their backs and peed nearby. The highlight of the trip was a visit with a nomadic woman who lives alone in a ger and produces milk products—yogurt, dried yogurt, curds and vodka—from the milk of her horses, goats, and sheep. She invited our whole group into her ger and let us taste each of the stages of milk processing. Some were delicious. Some, not so much. Her yogurt was amazing, and a caramel dish made from the cooked dregs of vodka distillation mixed with buttermilk and sugar was surprisingly good too. She prepared fry bread while we watched, rolling, oiling, and folding the flour-water-salt dough several times before dropping it in flattened coils into the hot oil. The resulting flaky bread was delicious, especially with fresh butter. Then we went out to the pasture beside the ger, where she and one of our drivers milked the mares while their foals stood by, having been given first drink.

The next day was not, as we had hoped, an easier driving day. Indeed, the storms had washed out the main (paved) road to the Singing Sand Dunes, and we had to go the long way around, about nine hours of track and gully wash. At one point, an ominous whining sound and smell of burning rubber came from the engine of our van (we move to a different van each day). The driver stopped and looked under the hood, tightened a few things to get the fan belt back on track, and announced that the air conditioner motor was broken as well. For the rest of the day, we rode with the windows open, filling the van with dust as we bumped along.

Today, on our mercifully shorter four-hour drive, our driver played traditional Mongolian music the whole way, which made it feel like a real adventure. We arrived last night to the Gobi Erdene Ger Camp, and fell into bed. Today was the dunes, and tomorrow, we ride camels for an hour through the dunes.

Well, enough words. Here are the pictures! (The quality may be poor, as we have limited bandwidth on the camp wifi. Such is life in the desert.)