It’s morning in Moron, a cold town in the North. Apparently the information I had about Tsetserleg was wrong, because it definately isn’t the second biggest town in Mongolia. Moron is bigger and there are even bigger towns than Moron. Still, they all seem a bit like backwater country towns with wooden fences and stray dogs milling about.
Yesterday’s car ride was pretty rough—no paved roads at all and sometimes we were driving through the grass with no tracks in sight. Driving through the grass may have been bad for the environment but it was nice for my bottom after the two hours of horse riding at White Lake. We were in the car from 8am until 7pm so it was a full day but we passed through some georgeous valleys full of gers and yak herds. Sometimes when we stopped for photos a little herder boy would come running down a mountain to see us, posing for pictures.
After this internet break and a quick stop by the market for water and chocolate we’re heading a few hours North to Khosovol, which should be beautiful. We’re already seeing some alpine-like scenes with evergreens and wood cabins. Many of the mountains here are still smooth green on one side but are now covered in evergreens on the other. The wind is very strong here and I suspect that has a big effect on how the trees grow.
We will spend two nights at the lake before looping back through Moron. Hopefully we can keep going through and make it to a town further East for the night. After than I have one more night near a famous monastery before making it back to Ulaan Baatar.
2 responses to “A Town Full of Morons”
HI.. i didn’t get any email update again.. But it oki 😛
Btw, if i’m not wrong, you will be heading tibet sometime in this trip? I heard there is a new railway heading right into tibet. Will you be taking the train?
There is a new railway, which I have been tryign to beat to Tibet. Unfortunately, it looks like it will start trail runa in July. Once the Han Chinese get a faster way to export their culture to Tibet it will be even worse that it has already become. I’d like to see Tibet before the Chinese completely ruin it as they’ve done to parts of teh great wall and the town of Lijiang in the Yunan Prov.
I will make my way overland to Golmud probably and then see if I’m still allowed to take the bus. No one is quite sure if foreigners will still have to pay around $200 extra to enter Tibet once the train starts running or if they will just no longer be able to take the bus and face even higher train fares. We’ll see, but it’s a long way off. I don’t expect to be thinking about that until maybe October unless my plans change drastically.