Mongolia & Ulaan Bator

We survived the first leg of the great Trans Mongolian Train ride and arrived in Ulaan Bator. We were picked up by our tour guide and brought to out hotel, nice change after a TV!

Ulaan Bator is a bit of a strange city; buildings everywhere in no clear pattern roads full of holes and no clear traffic rules so everyone jumps on the road. After showering and shaving we did a sightseeing tour through UB and it is a quite interesting place to hang around! Chengis Khan is everywhere! We also found out it is pretty cold over here, especially compared to Beijing and HK which I visted before.

On the second day we went to a couple more sights in UB and finally took off to our yurt camp, there were 25 yurt tents or so. Since we are not travelling in the tourist season we were the only ones. Live in a yurt tent is old fashioned, light a fire to heat up no water available and toilets were a little hole a bit further away. But the scenery is beautiful, very surreal mountains, and lots and lots of space!

Unfortunately we must have eaten something bad as we got sick on day 2 in the camp. Therefore we went back to UB and after a day with lots of rest we are OK now.

Today and tomorrow we'll hang around a bit in UB and than it is off to Russia, apparantly it takes the Russian customs 7 hours to clear the train...