Mongolia is totally awesome. Gregory, Sebastian, and I just got back to Ulaan Baatar from a 9 day jeep tour through the middle part of the country.

After driving 9 hours the first day, we spent the afternoon and night with a nomadic family in their ger. A ger is the nomads' house. They move every spring and fall and therefore need something mobile ( a third of Mongols are nomads ). The felt and canvas shell cover a wood lattice frame and a roof of red poles ( representing the sun ) meeting in the middle where the stove pipe rises through the ceiling. The floors are covered with wool rugs, and are very comfy. This camp had two families and 4 gers. The whole family contributes in some way including the grandparents. They had cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. The day is spent milking, making the food, repairing the motorcyle, and rounding up the grazing "snouts" at the end of each day, as well as taking them out to pasture each day. You should hear the sound of hundreds of goats and sheep going out to pasture in the morning. It is hilarious. This family was very hospitable. They served us salt tea, yogurt w/sugar, homemade bread, and an egg like substance filled with cream. We had fun taking their pictures, which they enjoyed as well. The little girls were very cute and did traditional dances for us. I enjoyed watching the mom round up the cattle on horseback while her husband playfully joined her for a bit on the back of her horse. They have a sharing tradition and we made the mistake of giving them a bottle of vodka in the morning while they were giving us tea and bread for breakfast. They shared it with us and it was finished by 9 am. From then on, bottles of vodka were given in the evening. They were still always finished within a few hours.

The scenary makes you feel very free in Mongolia. We drove 12 hours the next day through the most wide open and green steppe/pasture land. The steppes are a series of endless, open valleys, surrounded by low mountains. The tops of the mountains are covered in pine and they descend and give way into sloping, grass covered hillsides that slowly turn to the valley floor. You could hike and ride a horse forever. Sprinkled throughout are ger camps with their grazing sheep, cattle, goats, horses, yaks, and camels.

If you love horses, you will absolutely flip over Mongolia. Throughout or trip we saw countless herds of the prettiest horses. They came in every color and color combo you can imagine ( black, grey, brown, light brown, cream, brown w/white, black w/white, etc. ). The Mongolians have over 300 words to describe horse coloring. There were many newborns running around and lying on their sides. Many of the horses had beautiful thick manes from the recent winter. They all seemed wild because the herders leave them to fill up on grass. You also get very close to them.

Our destination was Lake Khovsgol. It is ginormous. It holds 2% of the world's fresh water and it freezes! In fact, it was still frozen and white when we arrived. We spent one day riding horses for 40 kms. Of course, there is always one problem horse in the group, and I got that one. However, it was great fun. We were largely left on our own and we got the horses to run around the lake and at the grazing yaks. The horses seemed to love that. My guy galloped for the home stretch. I thought he had been galloping before, but apparantly not! Wow, what a feeling. I felt like I was flying through the woods. We found our own ger tent right on the lake. It was georgeous. It sat on a manicured grass lawn with flowers, pines, and a view of the melting lake 100 yards away. The next day we hiked through the forest to view the lake. You could actually only see halft of it, it was that big.

Next we headed to another night with a true nomadic family and then to another beautiful lake called White Lake. We got our own ger again and had fun swimming in the freezing water and hiking to a volcano. The bed of the lake is the lava flow from the volcano and the lake is a sapphire blue. Great bird life as well. From there we headed to the ancient capital of Karakorum ( now called Kharkhorin ) and the earliest Buddhist monastery, Erdene Zuu Khiid, in Mongolia. It was built from the stones of Karakorum and these stones are the only remnants of the capital of what was once the largest empire in the world. It looks like the middle of nowhere now. After that we headed to Khustai National Park where we saw several herds of the last remaining, truly wild horses on earth, the Takhi. They were magnificant. We also saw some Turkic graves from the 6th to 8th century AD. The Turks were in Mongolia before Turkey!

Gregory, Sebastian, and I got along great and had a great adventure. It was a positive step for U.S. / French relations! We had so much fun with the nomads in their gers and loved the scenary. Mongolia is fascinating. The history is amazing. They ruled the largest empire in the world under Kublai Khan ( Chingis Khan's face is still all over the place here, still a national symbol ). I have heard the American Indians came from Mongolia. Several other ethnic groups started here, such as the Turks, before being pushed out. The nomadic lifestyle was great. Greg, Seb, and I were seriously thinking about finding Mongolian wives and living the nomadic life. The wide open, grassy steppes are so liberating. You feeling like running or riding through them on a horse forever. I met one guy who summed it up nicely saying, "My eyes have never seen so far before."

I have a few more days in Ulaan Baatar and then I head home for a month by way of Shanghai. I'm looking forward to seeing friends, family, and home, but Mongolia will be missed.