Traffic in Ulaan-Baatar:
The worst I’ve ever seen. The lonely Planet for Amman said that crossing streets in Amman is a perilous adventure. Compared to Ulaan-Baatar Amman is a kindergarden playground. Luckily we survived it, but this is definitely a city in which I did not want to drive a car. Lets see if it gets worse.
People on the trip:
John had the great idea of starting this trips in an untouristy part of Mongolia and seems like he slowly morphes into a Mongol himself. Maybe he simply needs a helping hand on his trips.
Telery and Laura – two of the nicest and coolest american girls I’ve ever met. So non-american to me 🙂
The hippies – a bit hippiesque but nice.
The british brit – don’t need to say much more. Nice and helpful while riding the horses.
Little princess – pfew… yep, exactly what it sounds like. Whenever work appeared on the horizon little princess magically disappeared. She was first on the cooking pots when dinner was ready – of course. She had more vodka than everybody else on the trip. “We should do…” was her preferred sentence – not including herself. This is a kind of a person that totally disrupts the group dynamic. I did less and less for the group as I did not want to do anything for her. And I only waited for the moment that she would ask me to pass something to her. I would love to have refused to. But it never happened.
Food:
Curry, curry, curry. We had a lot different curries while camping. We had indian curries with meat, without meat, a thai curry designed by Tom and me (well, it got best it could et with the spices and ingredients we had), some indian fusion cross kitchen. There was fresh milk, yoghurt and berries from local families. I could avoid the milk quite well as Tom could the meat. The two drivers sometimes cooked their favourite (and only?) dish: mutton soup. A great and very tasty soup made of mutton meat, carrots and potatoes (cooked to near death) and some noodles thrown in. A bit of salt added – ready for serving. I wouldn’t have had it all the time, but a bowl after a curry was always welcome. And it also was a nice change for breakfast from the ever present porridge (John loves sultanas – yuck). We had lots of rice with the curries. And John even baked bread in the wok. Delicious!
Oh – and not to forget the endless supply of chocolate and cookies. Around 2000 cookies and 5 big packs of chocolate (each including about 20 or 25 bars of chocolate). That is about 10kg! We had one pack each of plain milk chocolate, hazelnut and dark chocolate. And 2 packs of nuts and fruits chocolate. Obviously Johns favourite 🙂 Besides that we also had some kilos of peanuts.
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