#Lake Khubsugul

[sanaalex]

Lake Khubsugul, Mongolia

[supelenaua]

All in all, we got to the end of the horse riding part of the trip. We stayed at a small house at a holiday camp near town Hatgal. We probably looked amusing, because when our guide was discussing the accommodation with the hostess, we were in the saddles like real nomads, dirty and tired. We dismounted only after the final decision about our accommodation, took our packhorse and started to unload it. Perhaps, it was really authentic, because the people in the camp were curious about us and looked a bit surprised. We spent the whole next day in a car because we had to return to Khankh by the road which went along the other side of the lake. The road was mostly like a rut from a cargo truck, sometimes a simple direction in the steppe and rarely it was a normal earth-road with a huge amount of light dust. 180 km and 12 hours later, and the driver said “Wow, we have done it so fast!”. I still don’t want to know what “long” means in his point of view… Well, also, the car was broken and if we had sputtered out in any mire, we would have waited for somebody (a couple of hours or more), who could pull us. We were freaking lucky again and got to the Khankh without such troubles. On the way, we visited a couple families, which lived there for the whole year and shepherded their own livestock. The driver brought them some stuff like construction supplies, food and children’s toys. I still don’t understand why he brought one child a skateboard, because there wasn’t any even surface in the steppe like hard-top roads or special ramps, but the child shined with happiness, when he saw the toy and didn’t want to let of it. The families were hospitable and invited us - foreign tourists, who didn’t understand their language or traditions, to their fireplace and offered us their national food. We tasted the traditional Mongolian tea with soft homemade cheese at one place, and at another one there was kefir, hard cheese traditional for middle Asia (нorood, mong: хурууд), and something like soft beaten butter, that we smeared on home-baked bread. Also, we experienced the real living yurta and it was curious because I’d never seen something like this in any of my trips. It is an extraordinary mix between traditional countryside lifestyle with the home, which is made from fabric or thick felt, a fireplace in the center, the absence of water pipe, but at the same time there are solar batteries, satellite dishes and TV-sets. What is more, the owners can pack their house and move it whatever they want to , if they no longer like the view from the yurta door or the pastures become exhausted. We got to Khankh late in the evening closing the ring of the trip around lake Khubsugul. We had to leave Khankh the next morning and got to Irkutsk, but as usual something went a bit wrong on the way. The main problem was that the car had to be repaired, because the guide didn’t want to go to Irkutsk in the car with the broken starter. So they tried to repair the car till the evening, but it couldn’t be done. I didn’t know why. Probably, it was “because of”. Because it was Mongolia. We got to the customs half an hour before closing, we successfully got the marks in the passports from Mongolian customs and the engine gave out in the neutral zone. At that moment I put my thinking cap on about the meaning of the life and that sometimes it could give me small but curious moments. The driver tried to solve the starter’s problem, because he didn’t have enough space to bumper start without assistance, all in all he asked the opposite car to bumper start and we didn’t crash into it by inch. Meanwhile, I noticed that the national flag was a bit lower. I hadn’t heard any tragic news that day, so I asked the customs officer that had happen with the flag. And you know what he answered me? “It’s always in such a position”. Well, this is just our country, don’t worry.

[sanaalex]

Mongolia 🇲🇳, lake Khubsugul

Монголия 🇲🇳, озеро Хубсугул