A transit through Mongolia

We left Russia with style. In Ulan Ude, capital of Buryatia, my mobile phone being connected to ' Far East' or passing the 'Pacific Bank' already tried to make us aware off where we were. East Asia! After a good time in the temple with making pozi (yes, quite difficult so we mostly helped with dishes) and with some words of Mongolian in our pockets we headed south. After a ride with a small but very quick bus we experienced a new way of hitchhiking. While waiting along the road we did not raise our hands and Carina said " I don't know if hitchhiking works this way, picking out a car you want to go with and wait for it to pass and stop!" Indeed, from that bus we saw a jeep with 'foreigners' (a rarety in Russia) with a mark from Lisboa to Vladivostok and an Italian flag. We wanted to meet them ...though driving slowly they unfortunately passed us. They, because it was a team! A man on a motorcycle and a women alone in the big jeep. We started to hitch when to our surprise the car and motorcycle came our way, ... for gas ... . With a big smile we spoke to the man and then a hitchhiker miracle happened! We got a ride to Mongolia on a motorcycle. We switched several times between the car, driven by Marina, a Ukranian women living and working in Italy, and the motorcycle driven by Antonio, an Italia engineer in his fifties. It was truly great and I think for the first time I understand why people drive motorcycles, because I did not when driving on crowded big roads in Belgium for instance. The smell of the lands, indescribably beautiful, was really nice. We camped with them at the border (which just closed 15 minutes before we arrived), enjoyed Italian food, cheese and even wine. The first place where we met with some camels we stopped and went for a visit to a ger (jurta in Russian) and met with a truly beautiful family. A young couple with four children. The mother was only 25! The wild horses and other herds with their sheperds, the gers in the middle of 'nowhere', the mountains and vallies ... yes, yes ...what a joy. By the evening Antonio and Marina dropped us in the middle of Ulaan Baator, a true capital city. For the first time we strolled the streets with an address of a youth hostel in our hands. The beds, showers, equipped kitchen and plenty of travellers at Golden Gobi were a welcome gift and a surprising experience. After all the Russian I was somehow not prepared to speak suddenly in Spanish, French and English at the same time. The city architecture and the cyrillic used in Mongolia gave a feeling of slow transition to us. A transit to China because due to our transit visa we had little time to explore this vast country. By being in a youth hostel and being bound by limited time we also became different travellers. Mongolia was very cheap but in a way touristic. As a foreigner you can't hire a car for example without a driver (maybe because the roads do not exist) but this means that exploring the country is done by going on a tour, and that is what the travellers do. Some go 5 weeks from one tour to the other. I felt also a bit strange when we entered a national park the second day (by a very full local bus) and saw how nature was covered with hotels or ger-camps. Also here no detailed maps available for exploration on your own. But once we left the village and hotels behind us we had a vally, a cold river and the mountains almost just for us. That day we climed to a random top and camped there with a marvellous view. An encounter with a snake that climbed into Carina's unpacked sleepingbag made us decide to really put up our tent. When we drove back to Ulaan Baator the next day with a french couple we found out that the snake was poisonous! A la limite we managed to buy a trainticket to get into China just before our visa expired for the next night. Out of necessity I saw the Mongolian part of Gobi desert by night. Every time I fell asleep I was dreaming about landscapes and woke up again to look ouside from my train-bed. I saw three trees, some houses, a couple of gers, a sea-like landscape and millions of stars. Disregarding advice to close the window everything was covered with sand by the morning ... and suddenly we were in China! It was hard to believe!