UB, gold medals and the Chinese visa chase

So we hit Ulaanbaatar, which was a weird city. I don’t think the locals appreciate hoards of mouthy tourists descending upon their city for the short summer months. We heard numerous stories of people being robbed or beaten up, I got soaked by a bunch of kids who thought it would be hilarious to upend a tarpaulin filled with rainwater on my head (which was actually pretty funny in a happy-slapping idiot kind of way). And then there was the dead man lying in the middle of the pavement face up looking like he was having a really uncomfortable kip – one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen – the police standing around him having a casual chat added to the oddity.

Aside from this, we were lucky to be in town when Mongolia won their second ever Olympic gold medal for wrestling(the first being a couple of days before for Judo) the whole city erupted, there was so much glee everywhere you turned, the whole city turned into one massive smile – for about 12 hours the roads were clogged with people cruising around whooping, hanging out their car windows waving flags, drinking and celebrating – it is true that the best parties are the ones that aren’t planned, and helped to also prove that where there is bad there will always be a whole lot of good.

That being said and done, Marty and I were sick of the city – we didn’t bust our chops to get to one of the most isolated countries on earth to hang out in another city where there’s too many people to be able to an meet any. We’d scored our Chinese visas finally and bumped into Iain and Thibaud (last seen heading into the sunset on some dubious looking sidecar motorbikes - it turns out they didn’t get much further than Boris and had a similar hitch-hiking experience once their bike had shat itself) who were feeling as disenchanted with city life as us, so we figured we’d return to the vast nothingness outside the city limits one last time before visas ran out. So we did.

We had another horrible van 24 hours cross country. All I can say is we are very stupid and don’t ever learn our lessons. We finally got to the village nearest our destination, only to be sat down and given some horrible food (which neither asked for or wanted) to have a discussion about the fare which had almost doubled for no apparent reason and the entire village throwing in their opinions for good measure – English and Mongolian sign language does not equate to the same thing. By the time we’d figured out a compromise it was dark and sheeting down with rain and we didn’t have anywhere to sleep. Cut a long story short we eventually made it to the White Lake after much wrangling and this is where we slept...

All’s well that ends well.

A couple of wicked days hanging out here we had to head back to UB to catch the train to China.