Last night’s dinner will haunt me forever. All those inside bits being cut up – even the windpipe. We were all given bits of his lips to eat. I left mine in my bowl. Below: Me, waiting in the safe house last night for our jeep to be recovered from the ice bog.
I slept super well last night after showing my sheep videos again to different family members. Dad’s lovely shiny black Angus heifers were ‘yaks’!!!!! I grabbed a spare felt rug and put it over me and it worked a charm. It kept all my body warmth where I wanted it – close by. It was pretty heavy, but who cares. I was warm.
This morning we rose and packed quickly, not wanting to burden anyone. I rolled up the rugs we slept on and we were ready to go. Only thing was the vehicle wasn’t ready for us. The back diff had frozen in to place with all the water from yesterday, so the wheels came off again and there was a lot of ice chipping and water heating going on. We went for a wander around the yaks, read some books, sat around and finally it was lunch time. Chopped up grissly bits of the goat from yesterday and lots of potato. I opted for the potato. I was hungry, but not that hungry.
Below: Me and the yaks; Sarah and I standing in the middle of a frozen river
I got some cool photos outside in the morning too. We left around 1pm. It was going to be a 3 hour drive to Tsengel, a village I’d read a book about and was super keen to see. We went the long way round because of ice, and then just kept driving and driving and about 4 hours in to the drive, we were told it’d be another 3 before we arrived. Our driver spoke very limited English and mostly Kazakh so our Mongolian conversations with him were short and sweet as it was the easiest language for both of us. Basically we had no idea where we were going, why or how.
We drove up this massive hill (after lots of others, we’re in the Altai Mountain range, remember!) very slowly (others we had to zig zag up because of some car thing that meant we couldn’t use lower gears or go straight up the hill). We got to the top, I recognised where we were (relatively close to Olgii: we were suppose to be at Tsengel!). We got about 50m down the hill and BOINK, BUMP. There goes that wheel again. This time worse than last. The sun was setting, SO close to setting. We were a LONG way from any houses. Shitballs.
We started piling on clothes, making emergency phone calls to our volunteer manager and organising ourselves for a long cold wait. And I mean a cold wait. Staying outside tonight would have meant we’d be very close to freezing to death, literally, so we had some serious organising to do.
Low and behold, we were already organised. The driver had called his brother (the tour operator) and he was coming to meet us. He was expecting to just meet us somewhere along the way, and not with one wheel 20m up the road. But he came, picked us up, drove us to Olgii, took us to Turkish for dinner and then back to the hotel.
All is well that ends well!
Below: Claire and John crossing the half frozen river (the van went without us, with less weight); stopping for petrol in a small unnamed town, with a very pretty and new mosque; the petrol bowser; our super UN-trusty jeep with no wheel; close up of no wheel; the wheel up the road……
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