Shine-Ider family stay
Monday 27th June
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.
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.
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
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
