Mongolia!

After doing just a lazy 7000 odd kms, reading a buttload of books and eating copious amounts of Twix and Snickers we arrived in Ulaanbaatar. We hit the ground running and went straight into a city tour, visiting a monastery and temple surrounded by pigeons (considered sacred at that temple but still not very hygienic), the national history museum which was very cool and a lookout up a hill that showed you the contrast of new vs old. Mongolia is very rich at the moment due to a mining boom so there is construction happening everywhere, from the lookout you could see new roads and massive condo style apartment blocks going up everywhere in UB. And in between these massive buildings there are still people living in gers (a traditional Mongolian dwelling, a bit like a squashed teepee, soon to be our home)

The following morning we headed out to the Terelj national park, one of the most beautiful landscapes I've seen in my life. We visited a nomads camp and was served tea and snacks by an old cow herder's wife. Mongolian 'tea' is warm milk with salt, mmmm. The snacks were handmade cheese, very hard and dry, and something that was basically shortbread dough without sugar, both were politely eaten but seconds were not necessary. Later we rode Mongolian horses (almost ponies) which went where they wanted and didnt take notice of our reinwork. We spent the night in a ger before heading back to UB.

In UB we stayed at the Lotus Guesthouse, a hostel owned by the Lotus Children's Centre. This one one of the reasons we chose to volunteer at Lotus, the guesthouse is run by past residents of the orphanage and we liked that the older kids are given the skills to enter the workplace when they turn 18.

We stayed at the guesthouse for a week, and became good friends with a few of the other travellers staying. Most nights we went out for food and drinks with Rolly and Shauna, an American Peace Corp couple who had just finished a year long stint teaching English in a rural community. Rolly played in a basketball tournament for the US embassy team against other embassies like Japan, Russia and Kuwait. We got an invite and there was free food and 3 kegs. We drained all the kegs and Rolly won, good day!