Travel Blog Mongolia

Last weekend we were off to the countryside again to take a deep breath of fresh air and to do some husky sleigh stuff. #fancy #mongolianstyle.
Uyanga – one of the triathlete girls – organised it. Lennart, Vincent, Jessy, Kirsten and me were also on board. With us about 20 other Mongolians. None of the Mongolians excepted foreigners to take part in this because travel season is long over, but they did not count on us!
We started pretty early Sunday morning, and the evening before I stayed at Jessy’s house, doing a girls film pancake German baking evening 😀 Lovely!
Lucky us that we had Uyanga with us to translate and so we found out that we would go first for a hike to a cave. Well as I saw the mountain I quite knew that this would be more than a little hike. I guess the 2 to 3 km one way with around 500 meters of altitude and some slippery climbing parts were our first sport session on this day ☺
But I really enjoyed it! The cave was a former crystal mining. There were froze stalactites and stalagmites in it. Then the whole crawling, climbing part back down, more on the bud and the feet trying to sliding down than anything else. But quite fun and even the oldest worst prepared Mongol made it to the top and down!

Then we had lunch break in a ger, but too short to get really warm again. Straight after lunch on a full stomach we were off to the frozen river to do the dog sleigh tour.

We had to separate the group into two parts as we were too many people. Off to the sporty part number two: I formed a group with Kirsten. She took the steering part first and after approximately half way we changed.She had the part on the frozen river, slippery but more or less straight. It is strange to sit in front without having control over the whole thing, the dogs run as cuckoo and you can just stop by taking the break, steering the sleight with the own body weight and when stopping completely we had to take out a extra break, otherwise no chance to stop the dogs. I got the part were I had to hop off several times, hop back on the sleigh again, pushing the sleigh several times and controlling the snarling dogs as a cow passed by. I do not really know whether it is more cruelty to animals or whether the dogs really like it. One the one hand it seemed as the dogs like to give everything, then they bared their teeth to the other dogs in front of other sleighs and seemed very aggressive and finally I guess they were not kept and transported very good as most of them had a lot of bite traces…
All in all something nice to do, bit of action and we had quite a fun day!
But here some impressions!