From the Gobi we headed out to the western edge of Mongolia, the plan had been to ride ponies out into the national park for a few days but on the way we heard that the ponies had left for winter or been eaten or something so our refined plan was to hike in to the park. It was getting cold and our guide had hoped to spend the first night in a ger but when we got there we found that everyone had left for winter along with the ponies so we camped. In the morning I woke up to find there had been about 10cm of snowfall with more on its way, Baida, our driver, was in a real panic because he wasn’t sure that we could get the van out and didn’t fancy over-wintering with Tom. So the hiking was cancelled, breakfast eaten hastily and to Baida’s great relief we made it out of the mountains and headed to the eagle festival early.
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The festival was held over 2 days, I won’t tell you all about it because some of it was boring but the highlights were: the eagle calling, where riders made a variety of funny noises in an attempt to get their eagle to come to them or to a goat skin they were dragging; the camel race, having tried to get my camel beyond a plod a few days before, I was immediately impressed but there was one rider even less competent than me, having walked round the first lap his camel then refused to continue and lay down instead, we all laughed at the silly man; the man and woman race, I don’t understand why any of the men agreed to it, the couple gallop along while the woman hits the man as hard as she can with a whip, apparently they also have ‘secret conversations’ while he takes this beating; the coin picking practice, the actual event was much less impressive than the warm up when guys were galloping along with a hand scraping the ground; the mounted wrestling, a 2 player game where the object is to wrestle a goat from the other one’s grip, tactics used invloved plentiful crowd charging and some galloping between vehicles, sometimes they fell off too.
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On the long drive back from the festival we stopped at some hot springs, a place of complete luxury and our first showers for 2 weeks (3 in Noah’s case). It snowed again over night so under the influence of our Swedish friend, Jacob, we went from the hot water to rolling in the snow and back to the water, under my influence we also had a snowball fight, the photos are somewhat misleading.
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Anyway, we made it back to Ulaanbaatar just in time for the rugby, we’ve eaten plenty of vegetables after our 25-day mutton diet and are leaving tonight for China, land of the free.