Danny Yee >> Travelogues >> Mongolia

Shine-Ider family stay

Monday 27th June

photo
our sheep is carved up in the back of a car
We stopped in Mörön again on our way south; we needed to buy some meat for our barbecue that night. It being Monday, the market was closed, so we spent a while waiting for the word to go out that we wanted a sheep. I had fun taking photographs of the locals and of the foreign tourists who wandered by.

Eventually a satisfactory sheep was brought to us — and was carved up in the car boot. I'm not sure which van the meat went into, or where room was found for it.

Along the way, Chinzo showed us the different kinds of graves that we were passing. Kirghiz graves (from 840 to 924 AD) consist of mounds of rocks surrounded by rings of smaller stones. Mongolian (Hun? Xiognu?) graves have rocks laid out in squares, with pillar rocks at the corners. And Tuluq (?) graves are squares, but with a line of rocks leading to them.

Our second family stay had been prearranged — the previous Intrepid trip had stayed with the same family. We were welcomed with the usual dairy snacks, in this case very tasty cream (possibly something they'd worked out that tourists would like). Afterwards some of us went for a walk while our barbecue dinner was being prepared.

photo
cream
photo
a child's bicycle
photo
inside our ger
photo
the barbecue is prepared

Others climbed the hill behind the ger, but some of us headed for a lake we could see in the distance — it turned out to be further than we thought, maybe four kilometres, and only Justin, Carol and I made it that far.

photo
sheep and goats
photo
a ruddy shelduck
photo
the family looks at photos
photo
low light photography (crop)

We got back around 8, just in time for the mutton barbecue. This was most tasty and I ate far more than I expected to. For dessert we had yoghurt, which was really nice with some sugar added.

Tuesday 28th June

photo
a sheep with its throat ripped out
During the night I was woken by dogs barking, and got up and went out of the ger to relieve myself. In the morning we discovered that the dogs had been barking at a wolf, which had managed to get into the sheepfold, kill a sheep, and drag it 20 metres before one of the women, woken by the barking, got up and chased it off. (In a sense this was our fault, since the dogs had been tethered so they wouldn't bother us if we had to get up in the night.)

Next: Shine-Ider to White Lake
Previous: a Khovsgol hike
Up: 2005 Mongolia trip

Mongolia << Travelogues << Danny Yee