Entering Mongolia

Train 4, Ulaanbaatar to Beijing

Mongolia. So many impressions crowd in on me. I didn't have much time to write, so all this had to be written in arrears, so to speak. All of a sudden I met scores of people, saw endless, breathtaking places. I've tried to order my thoughts, though I'm not sure how successfully. :) Let me be your guide.
The first major task was to find of like-minded people to travel with. Most of Mongolia's sights and activities happen far away from the already extremely sparse centres of population. The country is huge and public transport practically doesn't exist (people give each other lifts as I found out later). The most basic things you need is a car and a driver who knows not only the roads and lay of the land but also how to get to the places of interest. Not many Mongolians know or have a sense of where or what tourists find interesting or want to see. What to the traveller might be the breathtaking White Cliffs might be a completely meaningless feature of the landscape even to people living next to it. If you want to hire such a driver with his car on your own you end up spending shit loads of money, so the common thing to do among backpackers is to frantically search around for people with the same destination and group into a car. A daunting task at first considering the number of guesthouses and tour operators in Ulaanbaatar these days and the number of tourists coming and going all the time. You could go brute-force and try to talk to everyone or leave a note in strategic places. I tried brute-force. I've never been a friend of notes because you never know when and how people will reply. Luck was on my side once more when I ran into Marc and Nicole. The two were siblings from Switzerland staying in the very same guesthouse as me. The also wanted to go to the north of the country. What was more they would be leaving on the same train as me. Talk about coincidence! The average jeep holds three people, so our search was pretty much done.
Now to plan the details of the trip. Our host, Bolod, has a lot of experience and lots of good reviews, so we decided we didn't need to look further. Khovsgol Lake and the plains in the north of Mongolia... Then there was this other Swiss girl (lots of German speakers, I know - I practically felt at home). She'd been around the country already. "The north is a lot like Northern Europe and the Alps", she told us, "if you want to see something new and exciting go south to the Gobi Desert." Nicole was the first to succumb. Maybe she was right. Then it got me too. In the end, Marc was gently overruled and we planned a route south. Hey, we're backpackers, we're allowed to be spontaneous.
So, Bolod organised us a Toyota Land Cruiser with, as he said, one of his "super drivers", who could even speak English. "A tour of Mongolia is an adventure", he said. He would be right.