Terelj National Park

I felt happy, when we left UB in the morning. On the one hand we made quite some friends in the guest house - Marcus, the american who is with his motor bike for 14 month on the road, he is waiting for spare parts before he can continue -, Bert, a swiss guy and Andrea a german ...also on the mountain bike and two other germans on the motor bike but one the other hand the city is so ugly and after that mugging I felt better beeing on the country side again ... that's what Mongolia is for.
After our breakfast we packed our bikes and said good bye.
We had to cycle 58 km to reach the Terelj National Park. After 18 km it started to ice rain and we looked for shelter in a restaurant and waited for better weather. After 30 min, 2 cooffes and a good soup we continued.
The scenery on the road was really nice and most of the 58 km where rough road and single trail. We reached the national park around 5, had "breakfast (sausage, toast, cucumber, tomato and chocolate" with a german speaking mongolian waitress and continued. Finding a ger in the tourist camps was not so easy (expensive) but finally when it got dark we found one.
The nice thing was, there was a mongolian tour guide, she spoke german and she arrange the horse riding trip for the next days for us.
We went to our ger and i made some fire ... a bit too much I guess , because we had to open the door for an our or so, to get rid of the 50 degree celsisus which we had in our room.
That country is in terms of climate really weird. In the night it is around 0 degress ...or below and during the day it heats up to 30 degrees.

Horse innards for lunch

We got a nice guide and two nice horses and started our ride. The guide was singing in mongolian and the scenery was just awesome.
After crossing a river (fuck i got wet feet) we had our lunch in a ger we will never forget. We entered the ger and saw a lot of innards , like liver, stomach and so on in some bowls. The ger was smelling and on the oven was a bowl, where a lot of things were cooked in the bowl.
Then we had to taste it and we found out it was horse liver, stomach and others things we don't know what it was. After the lunch we had to drink tea out of the same bowl and it smelled like horse.
Before we left ...the lady toke other innnards from the bowls at the side into the cooking bowl ...and we had to leave the ger really fast :)
Maybe Erikas horse smelled that we ate his mate because he refused to let her sit on it ... after I tried my luck .... the guide tried it but even he had a hard time.
The rest of the day we could not get that horse smell out of our noses.
After that we continued to the "Dshingis Khan" statue and "tschu" means go horse go ...
and they went ...i still don't know how those mongolians do it, because they have a wooden saddle ... me on my "upholstered" saddle i regreted the first time to be a man :)

Yak attack

We started our second day after a nice breakfast. We had to cross a river again (wet feet again) and were easily riding in a forest. We left the forest and suddenly artound 50 gazzing yaks saw us and started to run in our direction ...i was affraid coz my horse had a lot of energy and already run away 2 times ... our guide also got a bit nervos ...but he decided to attack ...he started to ride fast to the yaks and shouted and waived ...and a few meters before he reached them, or they him ...they started to run away.
We reached his "families" ger and had lunch there ...before we rode back. Erika fell shortly before we arrived from her horse in the mud ...nice that my horse waited and let her pass ...otherwise i guess it would have happended to me hahaha
We arrived and happy that we can change the horse with the iron horse now again :)