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IT WAS still dark outside when I woke up. The inside of the ger was cold but fortunately the bedding was warm. I got up, rugged up, got my camera and tripod and headed outside in the stillness of the pre-dawn morning.
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Early morning stars |
The bright moon illuminated the cloudless sky and faintly highlighted the towering rock formations, but the high altitude of this valley ensured the sky was clear enough for the stars to still be very bright. I quickly spotted the pole star. Over the hours I have slept, the sky had rotated enough for the dipper to be almost in full view. Cassiopeia was nearly vertically overhead.
Quickly getting cold in the alpine air, I returned to the ger, just in time for the young fellow coming around the gers lighting the fires again. Good. I will be experiencing heat and will be able to thaw out very soon.
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The sky begins to lighten |
Sure enough, despite the coldness outside, the ger quickly heated to near-sauna temperatures. The sky outside was just beginning to get light. Thawed out and already feeling hot, I headed back outside to photograph the sunrise. Unlike last night there were no clouds in the sky overhead for the brilliant colours of the dawn light to dance off.
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Frosty valley |
As the sky lightened, the valley floor became light enough to reveal a white frost that had settled overnight from the descending cold air. This of course would be nothing compared to the middle of winter when the air temperature drops to around minus thirty overnight and even when heated by the sun wouldn’t even rise to minus twenty in the middle of the day. That’s even colder than the inside of a freezer.
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Early morning at the camp |
The locals no doubt wouldn’t even notice this morning’s frost. This was quite a significant event for me having come from the subtropics where I live close enough to the coast to only experience the lightest of frosts only once every ten years. With the current pattern of overpopulation and global warming, the likelihood of me ever seeing a frost at home is now becoming impossible. Overpopulation was not an issue here in Mongolia. As mentioned before it has the lowest population density apart from Antarctica. Greenland also has a much lower population density, but technically it is a part of Denmark.
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My ger before sunrise |
Looking down the valley the yaks and horses were already up grazing on the cold grass, eating as much of the fresh pasture as possible before winter sets in killing most of it off.
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First sun on the hills |
A few people in the other gers were starting to get up. Some cloud now appeared rising on the other side of the mountains across the valley. The clouds were red and purple capturing the first light of the rising sun.
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Approaching sunlight |
It was not long before the hills started showing splashes of red from the sunrise. Minutes later the sun streamed across the valley to highlight the granite outcrops above the camp.
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Morning at camp |
The shadows gradually drew down from the outcrops bathing the camp in strong sunlight. The shadows continued to draw back across the valley as the sun climbed in the dark blue sky. When the sunlight reached the frosty valley floor, the frost sublimed rising in a cloudy mist evaporating from the ground. The moon was still high in the sky but will soon sink under the high line of the hills behind the camp.
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On the way to breakfast |
I packed up before heading to the log dining hall for breakfast with Dougie and Batu. As expected, it was a very large cooked breakfast in Mongolian style. I decided this will be enough food to get me into Russia and perhaps all the way across to Moscow.
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Mountaintop |
After breakfast, we finished packing up ready to begin the journey out of this amazing valley back to Ulaanbaatar, just fifty kilometres away. It was hard to believe the country’s capital city was so close to this remote wilderness in the middle of what had once been one of the biggest empires of all time.
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Valley frost turns to mist |
The vast expanse of the empire had largely been its undoing. The Manchu Empire to the west grew strong, scaling the Great Wall of China and ending the Ming Dynasty. Much of the eastern territories were no longer under Mongolia’s rule, so what remained became split into three area, Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia and Western Mongolia. The Manchus took Inner Mongolia and Western Mongolia. Outer Mongolia did become part of China, but not officially.
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Yak grazing |
Outer Mongolia resisted, but didn’t reclaim its independence until 1921 when the Mongolian Revolutionary Party formed allowing Mongolia to become independent from China. From there it turned to communism in 1924 forming the Policy of the New Order from 1932 onwards until accepted as an independent nation by the rest of the world in 1945.
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Heading down the valley |
Although independent of the USSR to the north and China to the south, it remained fully socialist until starting to decline in the 1960s, eventually leading to the peaceful democratic revolution in 1990 to form Modern Mongolia, with its flash city of Ulaanbaatar, surrounded by its ongoing ger nomads, the felt dwellers, to this day.
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Granite mountain |
By now the sun was high enough to brightly bring to life the shapes of strange petrified giants in the rocks again.
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Monolith at the end of the valley |
We headed down the gravel road passing the herd of shaggy yaks basking in the strong sunlight grazing on the grass. We reached the main road and followed it out of the valley, passing the final granite outcrop gates before entering the larger Tuul Valley heading upstream to the city.
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Fog over Tuul Valley |
Shortly before reaching the river, we descended into a very thick bank of fog hovering over the valley, perhaps dissolved frost from this morning. The fog was an indication of a fine day ahead for exploring the city.
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Fog clears as we approach city |
The fog had largely cleared by the time we reached Ulaanbaatar. We headed up to a Buddhist monastery academy, one of the few reminders of Ulaanbaatar’s origin as a large Buddhist retreat. Batu dropped Dougie and I off for a day tour around the modern mining city, a big culture shock thrust many hundreds of years ahead in time in stark contrast to the wilderness I had just experienced.
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Batu and Dougie |
We did some final group photos before Batu’s wife suddenly appeared from nowhere. They took off in their tiny car and Dougie and I set out on another adventure exploring the bustling city.
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