Adam and I spent 15 days in the Mongolian countryside, the desert and steppes and hills and mountains. We lucked out when looking for a tour. We were at a guesthouse looking into tours when a couple of Dutch guys we met briefly on Olkhon Island strolled in, about to book a trip with a group of their own.
We piggybacked on their group tour, and after cake and tea and supposedly homemade jam by Mamma, we were scheduled to leave in two days.
This is how it went for 15 days: pack into a badass Russian van and bounce across some seriously rugged roads at high speeds with your driver singing along with Mongolian music; stop to piss occasionally in the endless landscape; arrive at some sort of attraction and look around, climb around, fool around, and take photos; bounce across the land to a small ger camp and move your stuff into the round felt tent and relax by playing cards, bad music, or drinking booze when you had it.
Since there were 8 of us, we had two vans, each with a driver and guide. There were two Americans: Adam and myself; two French: Julie and Jeremie, a couple; two Dutch: Peter and Paul, both young and talkative, they only stayed 9 days due to visa issues; and two English: Tom and Alice, both 20 or 21, and Tom being a giant of a man.
Our two guides were both women, 28 and maybe early 30s and their English was good enough, though one had an unfortunate habit of talking way too fast and using "like" enough to annoy a valley girl. Our other guide wasn't as proficient in English and had a habit of giggling away questions she didn't understand, but both were super nice and kept us fed and generally informed.
Our drivers were fast and liked to sing. I never got their names, but one spoke a good amount of English. He was the one that drove us around after the Dutch split.
The drivers were always tinkering with their vans when we were parked for the night. A driver is much more than a driver here, he is a mechanic and navigator as well, and one of the more foolish things I heard the Dutch boys say was that they thought they could do a self-drive tour if they had more time to organize a jeep. It is not easy driving around, and even navigating with a GPS in an endless land devoid of landmarks doesn't sound like fun to me.
We stayed in gers every night. A family generally has two or three, and we stayed with families who were used to dealing with our tour company, so we usually had beds to sleep on. The gers were heated with stoves that burned yak and cow shit, which really isn't as nasty as it sounds. The gers in the wooded parts of the country burn wood, and doing that for a few days was nice.
Sometimes we wouldn't interact with the family much, sometimes we would. A few families toward the second half of the trip had little boys and girls we played with and gave pencils and notebooks and watercolors to. I blew a little girl's mind by pulling coins out from behind her ears.
We stayed for 2 nights in the 8 Lakes region, and some of us helped with daily chores like carrying water or chopping wood. One old weather-beaten guy compared tattoos with me and really enjoyed drinking our vodka.
All our meals were cooked and served to us, and the food got repetitive quick, but it was always hot and tasty and plentiful so it's hard to really complain. On a couple special occasions, we got freshly slaughtered goat. The first, we ate heart, liver, blood-filled intestines, lungs, kidney, etc. after watching the goat feebly die. The guy cut a circular hole in its belly, and then cut an artery inside somehow. He skinned and butchered it in his ger like he had been doing since he was 16, and there was surprisingly little blood.
The second fresh goat experience we had involved goat cooked by steaming coals and rocks. We were served an enormous bowl of barbecued body parts that were indescribably delicious. I, for one, very much enjoyed tearing the seared flesh off a goat leg with my bare hands and teeth. I felt like the worlds happiest caveman, covered in grease and full of meat.
The bathrooms were something else as well. Pissing required you just walking off wherever you liked, and usually shitting did too. The exception was when you were at a ger camp with a squat pit toilet. These weren't always pleasant, and sometimes were without doors, but it was more than compensated for with the most breathtaking views one could reasonably expect while shitting: rolling hillsides of gold grass, craggy rocks splitting the land, and horses and yaks grazing at will.
As for the activities, we did quite a lot. We rode horses and camels, climbed sand dunes and mountains, hiked past lakes and through canyons dotted with ice, saw temple ruins and desert cities, explored around a 20 meter waterfall and were treated to pure, clean air and clear starry nights and sunsets and sunrises unimpeded by nothing but the distant horizon. We even got to shower twice, though Adam inexplicably turned down both opportunities. What's up with that, man?
Late fall isn't generally the time to do such a tour around Mongolia, but I'm glad we did it when we did. It would probably be more expensive, and it would certainly be crowded with other tourists. We passed permanent tourist ger camps that were desolate when we saw them, but it was easy enough to see a shitload of whiteys scurrying around the place like ants in the summer time. We were tailed by another group from the same guesthouse, and I saw only 3 other tourists besides them: an American couple who stayed in the families ger when we were in a ger of our own for one night, and an older guy from LA who said hi briefly at a monastery market in Kharakhorin.
We had the countryside to ourselves for the most part, and I wouldn't want it any other way. Adam and I may go out on another tour, shorter, but to a different part of the country. Probably east or north. And why not? At $40 or $50 bucks a day for everything, it's certainly cheap enough, and who knows when we'll ever come back to Mongolia, as nice as it is?
