Beautiful, tortuous hike

Last weekend I took the opportunity to go hiking and camping with some friends and fellow interns in the national park that begins just south of UB. Using some somewhat incomplete internet information about where to find the minibuses to take us to the town where we would take taxis to the monastery where we would begin our hike, we got to the base of our hike in the afternoon on Saturday.

We poked around the monastery a bit. There was a delightful taxidermy/nature-art-made-out-of-nature museum. There were a lot of families who had brought their tents and were picnicking outside (picnicking in Mongolia is a complex affair that frequently appears to involve cooking entire sheep). We admired the view of the valley, and then began our ascent.

The plan was to do a longer, somewhat more challenging hike up the mountain, camping somewhere near the top, and a shorter, easier jaunt back into UB the next morning. The hike up was lovely. We followed a stream most of the way up the mountain through the woods. I’m not sure exactly what the phenomenon was that led to the way the water flowed, but for much of the walk it flowed under us. We were on a layer of mossy, piney ground over a gap and then flowing water. There were frequent calls of “HOLE” to warn those behind of the potential to fall through the first layer of ground. We climbed some rocks at the top and had a much better view of the valley and the mountains all around.

Our process of arriving to this point all involved some vague lonelyplanet dot com description someone had posted about getting to where we thought we wanted to be. We then set about looking for some good ground to camp on. Luckily for us, we did not stop at the first decent looking place, but continued along and found the actual peak of the mountain. Peaks in Mongolia are usually easy to identify because of the presence of ovoos, or a pile of stones which generally have a stick with lots of blue scarves tied around it which are used as shamanistic or Buddhist worship sites.

At our new, and much more impressive, peak, we found a great camp site, protected from the wind and already equipped with a nice, flat rock that we deemed the kitchen. Just after we set up camp we watched our peak get enveloped by fast moving clouds. The clouds passed by in time for us to see a great sky full of stars.

Back at kitchen rock, dinner consisted of: dehydrated borscht vegetables with the spices meant to go in spaghetti sauce but instead in water (both packets clearly with salt added) mixed with some jarred hot dogs and noodles. Dessert was a miniature bottle of vodka shared amongst us and chased with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

The next morning we packed up camp and got to looking for our path home. The biggest consideration was avoiding the presidential palace compound in order to avoid trespassing and machine guns. So we began hiking across our mountain in the hopes of taking the next valley down. It was not easy going because we weren’t on a path. It involved both climbing over (and up and down) boulder fields and going straight through some pretty thick, yet only knee deep, bush. As it turns out, the path we were hoping to find back to UB was over a couple more of these peaks. Our easy hike back, for which we had limited supplies, ended up lasting just a little bit past delirium approximately 10 hours later. Thank goodness the first commercial enterprise after you get down the mountain is Irish Castle Restaurant. I chugged a liter of water and then got to work on my cheeseburger, fries, coke and liter of beer.

It was a mentally and physically exhausting day, but worth the views, the subsequent feast, and the rock-like sleep that night. I will definitely miss being able to walk straight out of the city into the mountains!