Day 8 Mongolia
Luxury! A sleep-in this morning!
We've been getting up around 6.30am for 7am breakfast so we're on the road by 7.45am.
Breakfast was not until 8.30am this morning! It was great! A bed and the hours to sleep in it.
Breakfast was fine. Muesli with yoghurt, a flatbread of some kind, some bread and a little goats cheese & herb dumpling thing.
After breakfast we went and visited one of the local families here to get a better idea of how they live. Was one of the families who run this ger camp. While the gers themselves look reasonably comfortable the whole lifestyle is very manual. Everything is done by hand (making felt, pasteurising milk, making fermented horse milk etc...)
We tried the fermented horse milk (airag?) which I thought was really tasty. Texture of watery milk with a taste a bit like a light sour cream. A little sweet, a little sour ... my kind of flavour profile. I didn't drink a lot of it (maybe half a glass) in case my bowels exploded (sort of kind of lactose intolerant) but based on flavour alone I would have been happy to drink tons of it.
We also had some of their homemade cheese and vodka. The cheese was really hard little pellets. Could break a tooth on them if you're not careful. The flavour was similar to the fermented horse milk. Quite subtle and lightly sour.
The "vodka" was really nice. It was not the rocket fuel I was expecting. Instead it was really light and had a nice subtle alcohol flavour with some quite nice botanicals. I suspect it wasn't very high in alcohol but given it's basically moonshine who knows?
Cook group! I'm part of the cook group that did lunch today. I got swapped to one later in the tour since I've been sick. Still a bit sick though so didn't touch any of the food. We've got a few meals coming up so we'll need to get together soon and figure out what we're going to cook. The secret with cooking for large groups is keeping it simple.
Unfortunately there are always people with food things in a group this large. Everyone is a special and unique snowflake these days. We've got vegetarians, pescetarians, allergies and fussy eaters. It means a lot of the meals need to be a fairly generic base with extras available on the side for people who want them.
We're getting into a groove when it comes to the kitchen setup though. Everyone just sort of pitches in and things get done. It's working pretty well. I don't think I've noticed anyone slacking off too much.
We did a basic salad with couscous tossed in and some tuna, salami, bread and condiments on the side. Fairly standard for meals so far but it was nice. The couscous we bought turned out to be millet so it didn't quite work out as expected. Didn't tell anyone until after the meal though ... we just called it Mongolian Couscous and said it was different to the stuff we get at home ;] #fakeituntilyoumakeit
Amazingly I've used up about 800mb of my 1.1gb of local data in about 7 days. I might need to top up! Alternately I could just go without Internet for a few days ... that seems unlikely. We'll see.
Got some laundry done here as well. Surprisingly expensive. It cost me 20,000 MNT which is about $11. That's about what it would cost to do a load in a laundromat at home. I was expecting something in the $2-$3 range. Not that it matters ... nice to have all my clothes clean again.
Drinking! There was a little party after dinner with a few people. A small fire, some music, some beer & vodka and sitting in the hot spring pool until about 2am. Everyone else was pretty trashed but one of the Aussie girls and I just had a bit of a buzz going. It was good.
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