Lake Ogii

On day three we woke early and jumped back in the van. Today we were going to the old Buddhist temple of Tuvkhun which had been destroyed by the communists in the early days of the Mongolian republic. There were still a good number of temples that had been restored and there were about 30 active monks on the site, but also lots of empty space where buildings had been knocked down. It was quite a beautiful and quiet place.

After we had walked around for a bit we went nearby to where the old city of Karakorum has existed. A joint Mongolian/Japanese team had built a museum there outlining the dig and artifacts that were found. It was all pretty interesting, but the best bit was that there was a tomb of a nomad found nearby. The tomb was quite large and the paintings on stucco walls were mostly still intact, as were golden ornaments and the containers for the cremated bodies. The most interesting thing for me was that the people in the tomb were Turkic. They did not look like Mongolians, but more like central Asians in the “stans” over time they had drifted from the Mongolian Steppe to central asia and into Turkey itself.

After the museum we headed for lunch and then on to lake Ugii A note about lunch, being vegetarian in Mongolia is not easy. Every place we went to our guide had to explain to the wait staff what to make and pretty much every time it was egg noodles with vegetable. It was not a bad tasting dish, but having it day after day became boring. Mongolia does not naturally had a lot of fruit and vegetables because of the climate. People mostly rely on dairy products and meat from the herds that they keep and every time we arrived at a new family’s home we would share in these products, milk tea and, for Suz, perhaps a bit of goat or cow meat.

Lake Ugii was quite large, but our guide told us it expanded to about twice that size in the spring when the rains came. Kind of a neat thing to think about, and expanding lake. He also told me there were fish in the lake, but I was skeptical as it wasn’t river fed and when looking at the water later it was very clear, but free of vegetation. From the top of a hill overlooking the lake we took a few moments to get the view in. It was here that I asked about a pile of stones I saw. I had seen many of these along the way and wasn’t sure what they were, but my guide told me they were Ovo and when someone died the family would add stones to the pile along with some personal possessions.

That night we stayed in gers again, but an interesting thing happened. There were 4-5 gers at this location along with what looked like a wood built cabin. The family only had one ger when we arrived, but rather than have all of us stay together again the family volunteered to leave their ger for the night and stay in the cabin. This left the family ger to Stu and Suz, so there were lots of personal possessions around the ger. That night the family got up to some drinking and brawling, which we could clearly hear. We gathered in Stu and Suz’s ger to have dinner and, from time to time someone would open the door (there was not lock really), peek in, realize the family wasn’t there, and then walk away. Everyone was getting progressively more drunk (but us) so we thought we ought to remind the family that we would need some wood for our stove to light a fire. They promised to send someone around to do it later. Luckily they did, but funnily it was only to Aya and my ger. On the way to the bathroom I opened the door to our ger and found a fella in there poking the fire. He then pointed to a big plastic bag of coal and dropped the whole thing into the stove, plastic and all. I thought for sure we were going to die in the night. The next day I asked Stu about it and he said no one ever came to their ger and they were cold all night. The fella in my ger must have been shit faced and either forgot there was another ger and just thought the hell with it and chucked it all in our stove. We did stay toasty for most of the night.