Adventuring with Batman

Yaks at Lake Khuvsgul

Khuvsgul – Mongolia’s largest fresh water lake (by volume). Containing 1-2% of the world’s fresh water. Sister lake to Baikal in Russia. Respite to the majority of the Ulaanbaatar population over the Naadam holiday.

With a few days out of the office over Naadam, I decided to take the chance to see the much talked about Lake Khuvsgul, whilst the weather was at its warmest. Frozen solid enough in the winter to constitute a temporary road, Khuvsgul is approximately a 15 hour drive from UB to the north west through the scenic Mongolian steppe and over some less desirable bumpy dirt roads.

As my travel plans fell through the day before I was leaving, I took the opportunity to use my networks and sent a text to my real estate agent who was from Khuvsgul, asking if he knew how my friends (Big D, Cait and Dani) and I could get there. Within ten minutes I had a kind Mongolian man on the phone equipped with a Land Cruiser, his own camping gear and food, a portable stove, perfect English, an understanding of the Australian accent (after working in the mines with Aussies), spare time up his sleeve and a long list of friends saved in his phone that he could call at a moment’s notice when he didn’t know which way to turn at a crossroad. And when I thought things couldn’t get any better, he told me he went by the name of Batman.

We set off the next day out of rainy UB, equipped for our long drive with a load of junk food, packet noodles and a mix of English, Chinese and Mongolian music. It’s the best time in terms of daylight at the moment, with the sun rising at around 5.30am and setting at around 11.30pm, so we were able to pull up quite late in a meadow of tall grass and wildflowers to set up our tents and light a fire. We cooked s’mores, drank vodka and slept with the rain on the tent roof before getting up at 6.30am and doing it all over again.

A word of warning when you are travelling through Mongolia – towns are far and few between so if you need to use the bathroom, be prepared to block out the world with your mind as you pee on the side of the road where everyone can see you! The Mongolian steppe consists of rolling hills and grassland – and not much else. No bushes or trees to hide behind here! ;)

Ger camp at the Lake

After four days of rain in Khuvsgul the clouds parted and blasted us with beautiful sunshine as we arrived. Batman drove us up the west side of the lake to a ger camp recommended by his friends, with a stunning view. After wandering around meeting the wild horses, cows, yaks and caks we sat on the lake front and cooked up a tasty pasta dish on our stove. The ‘tasty’ part was most likely attributed to the jar of pesto we brought. That stuff makes any dish taste amazing. We adopted the yak as our new favourite animal. At one point we seen a pack of dogs running toward us, which we thought was odd, until we realised they were baby yak! They sprint everywhere and wag their fluffy tails in the air like dogs. They are super cute.

Yak

In the morning we shared scrambled eggs and then drove further up the lake and wandered out on a pebbled spit that was built up about 5km into the lake. To one side it looked like we were in Canada with mountains surrounded by cloud and covered in pine trees. To the other, it felt like we were in Greece on a pebbled beach front with crystal clear water.

Batman had befriended some of the other holiday goers in our camp so that night, we attempted to develop our international relations by serving up an Australian delicacy - Vegemite sandwiches. They were not impressed. I think they were expected the flavour to be more like chocolate. With our limited supplies the only other thing we could serve to salvage the relationship was s’mores. We were winners again! It could have also been because we shared our vodka with them. More vodka appeared and we conversed through our translator Bat. Eventually the men discovered a world map and all stood around it apparently discussing how Mongolia could take over the world, whilst the girls snuck out to the lake and did some star gazing.

Mongolian map of the world

Our new friends invited us to their breakfast khorkog the next morning, which was a real honour. The sheep carcass which we had seen hanging from a verandah (next to the bear skin) the previous day was cut up and placed inside a metal milk jug along with stones that had been heated in a fire. They added some potatoes and water to make a kind of stew. Being confronted with a plate piled with a lot of bones, fat and some meat, along with and a cup of soup (sheep juices) was a little hard to handle first thing in the morning but we tried our best not to offend!

As Big D gnawed on a left over bone we hiked up the side of a small mountain through wild flowers, moss covered trees, butterflies and pretty spider webs. We even saw a baby deer. I half expected Edward Cullen to jump out, sparkling in the sunlight. Expecting to find a view of the lake at the top, instead we found a huge ovoo, a sacred site made of stones and wood. They are often found in high places, and you should walk around the ovoo three times in a clockwise direction and leave a rock from your journey on the pile. Sometimes people also leave money, milk or vodka and I’ve seen a few with crutches left behind, where a visit to the ovoo has resulted in recovery from injury for the visitor and they have walked home without their crutch.

Ovoo

We left our ger camp with the aim of driving around to the east side for a night, but soon found that it required a six hour drive over extremely rough terrain and a couple of mountains before you would actually see the lake. So instead we followed the advice of Bat and decided to start travelling back to UB via a new route, heading south on a dirt road for 250km and then east on bitumen road back to the city.

Our estimated five hour detour instead took two days. But turned out to be the most spectacular detour! The scenery changed dramatically and at the top of every hill was a completely different view, like we were travelling into a different country each time. Even Bat agreed that it was most scenic part of Mongolia. With the windows down, the sun shining and the music blaring, we hung out the windows with our cameras like we were on safari. We drove through herds of yaks, through muddy rivers and up mountains. We saw lakes, rivers, volcanoes, caves and forests. Herders dressed in their traditional deels rode past on motorbikes and horses and crazy urbanised Mongolian’s drove their Prius’s offroad straight up the sides of mountains, through rivers and eventually got themselves bogged on muddy tracks.

Three hours into our drive we’d only covered about 50km. As a huge storm closed in on us, we searched for somewhere to camp and eventually pulled over a herder cruising past on his motorbike. He offered to let us stay at his place, so we parked next to his two gers and set up our tents surrounded by his sheep and goats. He kindly invited us into his ger to meet his wife and three sons where they offered us some aaruul (dried milk curd) and hot water for our cup noodles. They were so kind to invite us in, probably the only traditional herders ger I will see whilst I’m here.

Herders ger

We drove for over 14 hours the following day and spent our night in Kharkhorin, an area which for a short time was the capital of the Mongol Empire. We stayed in a brand new ger camp and got our Aussie bush tucker on with some damper and spuds cooked in the stove fire. I ordered some beers to accompany our final dinner however Kharkhorin has an alcohol free day every Friday so we were out of luck. That night I tried to close our ger door only to find it was so new that the door didn’t fit into the frame properly. I tied the door shut, but shortly after a massive storm started which lasted all night and filled the base of our ger up with water. The rain on the felt roof was calming, but the water streaming dripping through the centre of the roof around the live power point was not!

Somehow we miraculously survived potential electrocution and piled back into the Bat Mobile for a seven hour drive back to UB, just in time for me to shower, wash my clothes, dry them with the hair dryer and get on the train to my next destination – a disadvantaged children’s camp three hours north of UB organised by the Australian Red Cross.

The gang - Bat, Dani, Kerry, Cait, Big D