Ger camp visit

After arriving into Ulan-Baatar Station at 6am we were immediately whisked away for our overnight stay at the Ger Camp.  Beware - very picture-heavy post!

Stephen had some trouble with the door to our ger, where we stayed for the night.

We visited a local nomad family who still live in their traditional lifestyle in the Terelj National Park (although with a lot of tourist visitors, one assumes).  The ger is their home, and they move it around 6-12 times a year to allow their animals to graze nearby - they usually only move about 25-30km away.  Apparently nowadays they do a lot of moving by car, rather than horse-drawn cart.  The ger is the round tent; those buildings next to it are housing for their livestock (cows, sheep, goats, and one horse). 

Apparently two or three families usually live together (friends or relatives), so that they can work together to share the load on putting up the gers, herding the animals and all of the other tasks.  All gers face south so that the sun wakes them up in the morning.

The ger is a single room, with a wood-burning stove in the middle with a metal chimney and two poles to keep up the roof.  The beds are on either side (everyone uses single beds).  That's the elaborately painted red wooden bed on the left-hand side of the photo.

Stephen's Mum tried on the Mongolian national costume (which a lot of people in the city were wearing around for seemingly no tourist-related reason).  Apparently it weighs a ton as it has sheep skins sewn to the inside to keep them warm in the -40 degree temperatures. 

After the visit to the local nomad family, we hung around in our ger for a while, which actually looked very similar to the nomads' ger.

Building a ger is pretty simple, it seems.  You have a lattice around the outside, and wooden poles radiate out from a central roof circle to make up the roof.  The ger is lined with felt, and they add more felt layers to keep in more heat as it cools down - 2 felt layers in summer and 5 or 6 in winter.

Stephen and I climed a hill next to our ger camp to check out the surroundings - the place was beautiful.  Clear blue sky and mostly empty dirt with small bits of grass around and only a few trees.  That's our ger camp you can see at the bottom of the hill.

Stephen is a true man of the wilderness, mobile phone in hand.

In the afternoon, we went on a 4 hour ride on some Mongolian horses, which are smaller than normal horses.  Regardless of their size, we were still in a lot of pain the next day - too much time in the saddle for sacks-of-potatoes like us!  Despite this, the ride was pretty cool - the landscape was beautiful!

We rode to a meditation centre/buddhist monastery, which was beautiful.  These are Buddhist prayer wheels - each one has a verse inscribed on it, and turning the wheel clockwise 3 times is equivalent to reading the verse.  People walk around the building turning each prayer wheel as part of their worship.