When we arrived in Mongolia we spent our first full day getting some much needed cold weather gear. We visited a large market on the edge of town with everything you could ever need, and left between the four of us with 3 jackets, 1 zip up hoody, 2 sweatpants, 4 pairs of gloves, 1 woolly and 2 large chicken legs. The chicken legs didn’t make it very far. We also headed to a Decathlon, and discovered that Mongolia is perhaps the only place in the world where this is an expensive sports shop, not the cheapest possible option for hiking pants and base layers. We were all pretty much ready for our expedition into the wilderness, except Creed who was without a warm outer layer still because he didn’t want to buy a matching jacket with me.

On Tuesday we had a full day planned with Ari and Ikhee, a couple we met on safari in Tanzania back in January. It’s incredible to make such weird and wonderful connections all over the world, and meet again 6 months later on the opposite side of the globe. It enhances our travel so much, and definitely enhanced our Mongolia trip. Ari and Ikhee are fairly well travelled, and said that they’ve met many people who talk about wanting to visit Mongolia, but no one has ever actually made it before us. They organised a visit to the main museum in Ulaan Baatar which detailed the extremely interesting history of the Mongolian Empire. After the tour here we went for lunch and had our first sample of Mongolian cuisine, including a sheep’s head stir friy, offal empanadas, and dumplings in milk tea. Noone liked the offal, but the sheep’s head was actually quite tasty, although I found a piece of ear that was particularly chewy. In the afternoon we visited the largest and oldest temple in the city, with an enormous Buddha statue inside – the tallest indoor statue in the world. We spent some time feeding the pigeons outside the temple, and then headed to a warehouse to buy some more warm clothes, this time made out of camel and yak wool. Our last stop was a monument on the outskirts of town, overlooking the skyline. Ulaan Baatar is actually quite built up, as it’s where 1/3 of the country’s population lives. There’s not so much of interest to tourists though, so we pretty much ticked everything off in one full day. Ari and Ikhee were a joy to spend the day with, and so generous.

The next day we set off on an epic two week road trip and you can read all about it here! When we returned, it was time for the main reason we’d wanted to visit Mongolia at this time: the Naadam Festival. This is Mongolia’s biggest national festival, celebrating three main sports, wrestling, archery and horse racing – considered the ‘manliest’ sports. A more recent addition to the line up is knucklebone shooting, a version of boules where you flick the knucklebone of a camel at a stack of other camel knucklebones and try to knock them down. There were a few pre-festival events, so we attended a ceremony at the main square in town where people laid flowers at the statue of Chinggis Khan, before spending the afternoon relaxing at our apartment, making use of the kitchen and refrigerated drinks, and watching movies. In the evening we headed back to the square and attended an outdoor showing of the Mongolian National Opera, which involved real horses and camels on stage.

The 11^th July was the first official day of Naadam in Ulaan Baatar (the smaller towns often celebrate in the preceding days) so we headed to the stadium for the opening ceremony. The tickets had sold out online in a record 10 minutes, and when we tried to snag some at the door people were wanting far too much money for last minute entry, so we settled into one of the grassy food court areas to watch on the big screen, along with many many locals. The sun was blazingly hot so someone generously lent us a large umbrella to shelter under. The ceremony was full of cultural and fantastical costumes, dancers and horse riders, and musical acts including The Hu (who we’d originally thought might’ve been The Who, but definitely weren’t).

After the ceremony we grabbed some delicious barbecue, and then wandered around the stadium to see what was happening. We peered in when the wrestling started, and at this point the guards were happy to just wave us in without tickets, so we were able to watch for a while with proper seats. The aim of wrestling in Mongolia is just to get the other guy on the ground, so they’re fairly quick rounds. When you win you get a little victory hat and do a quick run around the victory post, and then you proceed to the next stage where your hat gets removed in a quick ceremony and you have to win it back again. It all seemed pretty low key and disorganised for the main day of the biggest competition of the year in the capital city. Next we headed to the knucklebone pavilion, where teams were gathered around long carpets intently watching their colleagues flick a piece of bone at the target, while the opposing team all made a kind of wailing noise in an attempt to put them off. Apparently this game used to be played by Chinggis Khan, but it’s definitely more of a game than a sport, so it’s a little odd to have it celebrated on the same level as the main three events. Finally we hit up the archery, where a line of men let loose their arrows seemingly in no kind of order, just whenever they felt like it. They were aiming at a pile of bricks rather than a target circle, so we’re not sure how the scoring worked. After the men it was the women’s turn, the first time we’d seen women participating in the historically very male sporting festival. Unfortunately the weather decided this was the perfect moment to start pouring with rain, so the archers all ran for cover and we decided to call it a day and head home.

The day before we’d been stopped by two guys with a camera who wanted to interview us as foreigners to find out our views on Ulaan Baatar. As a thank you they gave us wristbands with free entry to an evening event at the National Amusement Park. So we headed out in the evening to a very weird shindig with a live band, and had a great party night to celebrate the end of our trip all together.

The following day we headed back out of town to the racetracks for the horse racing. We got a taxi who gave us a very cheap price for an hour ride, and once we got to about 2km from the destination where the traffic was pretty much at a standstill we let him go and walked the rest. We were able to walk in over the hill and get a great view of the sea of tents that had sprung up around the tracks for the festival. We headed past some vip areas and got to the stands where we snagged some good seats before they filled up. We didn’t realise we would be sitting for a full hour and a half before any racing actually happened. The horse races are long, I think around 18km, so there’s only a couple a day and you really only see the end. The one that we watched was the 2 year old horses, and the jockeys all looked to be between 8 and 12 years old, riding with no saddles, clinging on for dear life. By the time they were riding past us there were a couple of horses with no rider, but I don’t believe there were any serious injuries. I think it was actually a riderless horse who finished in first place, and I don’t know if that counts. We walked around the huge festival area after the race, past fairground rides, souvenir stalls, fast food tents and ice cream stands. There were people on horses everywhere, not racers, just locals who preferred to be on horse than on foot and this was an acceptable location for that. We headed out towards the road and asked a local for directions to the bus, and she just said no don’t do the bus just get in our car, and she and her sister drove us back to town and talked with us the whole way. The traffic in this direction was horrendous so it was a long ride, and we were very grateful to them for their assistance.

Thanks for following along on my crazy adventures!

 Ros ♥

If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!