Turtle Rock

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THE SPECTACULAR outcrops on top of the mountains look down on the valley and its inhabitants. You can’t help but thinking the people over the ages have seen these as figures watching over them. After all many of these looked like heads on top of torsos the way they had eroded.

Shorn yaks

I headed into the log cabin for lunch. It was even more elaborate inside as it had been out. It was very spacious (particularly as there were no other groups here yet) with a large bar in the middle. I found Dougie and Batu already seated at one of the tables, so I joined them for a rather large lunch of pasta.

I was still a bit full from the large breakfast I’d had at the hotel this morning. I normally have a large breakfast in the morning (especially when it is part of the accommodation cost) so I don’t need to each much during the day. I was carrying a bit too much weight as I had been eating quite a lot all trip, expecting the meals in North Korea to have been small (but they were enormous) and I had eaten rather too much in China as well. It turns out the Mongolians are huge eaters too, especially with the cold weather.

Yaks

Dougie works as a tour guide during the short summer season, but he mentioned he works as a professional model during the winter when the tourism has completely dried up. He was very good looking, and it did surprise me just how much he ate especially with the tourism starting to dry up and the modelling season soon to commence. He had a very long Mongolian name, but when with tourists he goes by the name Dougie. Batu was a small man, but he too ate like there was no tomorrow.

With lunch finished, it was time to explore more of this amazing valley.

Yak with a dark tongue

Heading out of the Guru Camp we passed the farming paddocks towards the bottom of the valley. A herd of yaks were grazing near the road. The domesticated yak is found throughout the highlands of Nepal, Tibet and Mongolia, living in some of the harshest grazing conditions in the world. They were a dark chocolate brown colour. Their backs and sides had been cut of their very long hair, with the cut areas now growing again, hopefully in time for the winter. Their undersides and tails still had full length hair, very long and shaggy to help them cope with the severe winters.

Yak

Their long coats made them look rather top-heavy on their thin hooved legs. Their dark tongues were very long, perhaps to help dig through the snow for vegetation.

We reached the main road and continued heading up the valley. After some distance we were approaching a dramatic rock face carved out by an old glacier. At the bottom of the rock face was a large hotel under construction. Rising about six levels, the concrete formation will soon become a luxury hotel, taking away from the pristine conditions of this amazing park. There were several hotels under construction, to accommodate the increasing tourism to this area. I was very happy to be exploring here before the craziness of overcrowding begins.

Heading up the valley

We turned off following a gravel road along the bottom of a side valley. The little car shook as we bumped along the road heading up the sloping valley in between the mountains elevating some dramatic rock formations of granite.

The road rose a little out of the bottom of the valley where a stream flowed through a forest of trees brilliant in their autumn colours. The road rose passing a spectacular rock formation straddling the downward slope. Towering twenty four metres high was the dome of granite known as Melkhi Khad, or in English, Turtle Rock. It was very well named as it looked like a large turtle shell with a Godzilla-like head overhanging over the top.

Dramatic mountains

We stopped just before the rock, and walked back down the road a short distance to have a good look at it.

During the ice ages this particularly tough outcrop of rock would have silently resisted the glaciers which had no choice to go around and over it to erode the softer surrounding rock. The hard dome survived the ice ages and stands as a dominant formation to this day.

At Turtle Rock

Furrows ran down the lines of gravity around the shell and head, showing the erosion that has successfully worn some of the rock. The head even had a circular indentation resembling an eye.

To the right of the valley (looking upstream), the mountain quickly rose in a spectacular rocky outcrop with the occasional pine tree growing wedged in between enormous boulders that have rolled down in recent centuries. The cliff rose to two dramatic peaks, one of smooth rocks, and the other with smaller rocks.

Towering rock formation

The left side of the valley rose to a more rounded hilltop covered in pine and deciduous forest, the deciduous trees yellow with the autumn. On top of the hill were five formations looking like fat men, each with a round boulder on top resembling a head. The middle one in particular looked like an old man looking away towards the sun. The formations seemed to be an eternal gathering, perhaps a rock-moot of wise men.

The rockmoot

I imagined the mammoth hunters of tens of thousands of years ago, and the nomadic ger-dwelling tribes of recent millennia would have looked up to these formations perhaps as gods and protectors watching over them. They have stood as guardians of the valleys through the tens of thousands of winters of human habitation and hundreds of thousands of winters even before the first humans ventured here. Perhaps this is why they seemed so wise in their timeless inanimation.

The rock-moots of the mountaintops were watching over the unique structure of Turtle Rock, revered by its nomadic inhabitants and visitors alike, which this day we were admiring.

Village under a mountain

We returned to the car and continued heading up the valley bouncing along the rough gravel road in the tiny sedan, watched by the giant monoliths on top of the mountain ranges.