three days on the steps

IS that how you spell "Steps"? Doesn't quite look right to me. Well, we were there, no matter how you spell it. This morning we returned from a 3 day trip about 100km north of Ulaanbaatar (which is to say, we were north of the middle of nowhere). The road out of town was narrow and bumpy to begin with, and then sort of petered out all together after about an hour. We were driving through wide open, rolling hills and plains. It is spring here, although only the trained eye knows it. The ground is brown and there is absolutely no sign of green. Well, except for this one totally random golf course, where we could see at least 10 little putting greens that were almost florescent in comparison to the surrounding brown. There were conifers and decidious, but neither had any leaves or even needles. We passed herds of cows, yaks, horses, goats, sheep and the occasional super wooly knock-kneed, tufted-humped camel. Finally we came to our ger camp, where the van deposited the 7 of us and quickly departed.

We had thought we'd be sharing the adventure with these two other couples and a woman from Korea, but we were quickly stowed away in our own private ger (that's mongolian for "yurt") , with two beds each and a small stove in the middle. Shortly after we arrived, we headed out for a hike in the hills. There were HUGE rock formations, big sweeping piles of rock and cliffs. They sort of looked like puddingstone close up, and their curved shapes reminded me of the boulders in parts of the Arboretum back in Boston (will someone say hi to the arb for me?). There are pockets of forest, but still no leaves. We hiked through a valley that also had birch trees, and here there was a thin carpet of last year's leaves, a few pine needles, and moss. The crisp and *clean* air smelled like the White mountains in November- one of my all-time favorite scents. It was exactly the kind of invigorating hike we needed. When we returned to the ger, two young girls from the host family appeared with lunch. My brother had warned us about the quality of food in the ger camps, so we were prepared for the clear noodles with ketchup and three or four small pieces of beef. The c0le-slaw was decent. It turns out that all the meals would be a variation on this theme- sometimes with potatoes, sometimes as soup, sometimes with rice. It made us appreciate how hard life must be out here on the steps. They always brought us weak but hot tea, which does the trick. I think it must have been about 30 degrees F yesterday, and the wind was so ferocious I'm sure it brought the feel of temperature down into the 20s. Despite the weather, we decided to stay another night.

We got to do two horseback rides- and those were pretty spectacular. The first was through the valley, which meant we could trot (very bumpy and hard on the quads) and sometimes canter a little bit. They took us to the local supermarket- which was about 40 minutes away by horseback, and really was just a room in someone's house. I bought water and two snickers bars--the traveler's mana. Yesterday they took us way up into the hills- up steep mountain slopes and down into river valleys (but no water this time of year). The return was just mercilessly cold- it was like riding through a wind-tunnel. I thought about all the different kinds of rugs and blankets I'd seen in the market in the city and thought about how easy it would have been to bring some along. But clearly we survived. And in sum total, it was pretty derned fun. I only thought about my family in the carribean once or twice. Once or twice an hour, that is. :)

All the wind meant we had a totally clear night. We had moved to a different ger, a warmer one, and had one more person in there with us to keep it warm (a fellow American- a mountain man from colorado). I still got up in the middle of the night to add some wood to the stove, and went outside to see the stars. I gotta admit that when I opened the door, I was startled at first by how close the stars and the mountains seemed. There were so many stars I barely recognized the night sky. It makes me sad to think of all the clear nights we have in Boston and still we can't see stars like this. Back in my bed, from about 2am to 3am I couldn't sleep- I just kept trying to think of a way that we could live somewhere that we could see stars like that every night.

This morning the wind finally stopped, and it was clear, sunny, and just gorgeous. As I told my teammates back in Boston, before our van came to pick us up, I pulled out my disc (a disc is a"frisbee", for the few of you who are not familiar with ultimate frisbee out there) and made Eric and our ger-mate throw with me. We also got a young Mongolian girl to join us- and clearly she had seen a disc before because she had a mighty backhand and could catch one-handed. I was tempted to leave my disc with her, but that would mean we wouldnt have one fore the BC leg of our trip and that's not cool.

I wish we could have spent more time out there. When the wind subsided, it was so peaceful and quiet- we saw two ravens fly by and we could hear their wings beating the air. We watched some kind of small raptor hovering above the cliffs- posing in the wind so it looked like he was just floating in one place without using his wings. The horses we had ridden the day before were hanging out in a patch of woods up in the steep slopes, and they watched us watching the birds. So peaceful.

We are back in the city now, and Eric starts teaching his 3 day course tomorrow. Maybe we'll run out to the countryside one more time on Thursday before we return to China.

xoxo
betsy