Mörön

In Mörön we first went to the big market, so we could buy more bottled water. I got a bit lost wandering through the container market.

Mörön was noticeably bigger than Bulgan, but still pretty run-down. As elsewhere in Mongolia, however, even dingy areas had some very fashionably dressed women — the woman in this photograph is not a tourist, but a Mongolian with her hair dyed red.

The first restaurant we tried had no vegetables, so we went to another. While they were preparing our lunch, we went to the post office (Peter and I walked) where we sent off postcards, tried to make phone calls, and queued up for Internet access — there were four computers on a single shared modem that kept dropping out.

Lunch was an excellent meatball dish; most people went for the cold beer, but I tried the local softdrinks. We visited the supermarket for chocolate and people stocked up on film in a camera store, where Mike and Barbara bought a cheap film camera to replace one that had broken (and a digital camera they had no charger for).

Heading out of Möron, I realised I had to go to the toilet. I didn't want to stop everyone just after we'd got under way, so I decided to wait for half an hour, hopefully till we were somewhere scenic. The problem was neatly solved for me when one of the vans lost a tire to a nastily pointed little rock. While the tire was being changed I relieved myself and, having spotted some kind of small mammal scuttling for its hole in a little gully, I sat down and staked it out, getting my first reasonable squirrel photo.

Entering Khovsgol National Park we had a nice panoramic view of the Eg River valley.

We went past Hatgal without stopping. The road then bumped along a dry gravel riverbed and over a pass to the shore of Lake Khovsgol, which we followed north to the Blue Pearl tourist camp.

Next: Lake Khovsgol
Previous: a family stay
Up: 2005 Mongolia trip