So I left off my last Mongolia post at Erlich the eagle hunters’s home. This was the highlight of our trip. As I said before, we asked him dozens of questions about his eagle, their training, his past, and the community. The next day we were supposed to get a short demonstration of him calling his eagle off the barn wall and then head to a throat singer’s home on our way back to the city. But we were all so enthralled by the eagle that we decided as a group to spend the day …

Western Mongolia is awesome! I met with my new tour group in UB the night before we caught a plane west to Ölgii. Our driver from the tour company picked us up at the airport and brought us to town to pick up our guide/translator, cook, and supplies. We went to the museum in town to learn about traditional clothing and the fauna of the area, and then went 100 km to our first Kazakh family home.

90% of the population in this province are Kazakhs, descended from migrants here. They speak the Kazakh …

My last posts have been manic, “I need to post SOMETHING with my 2 hours of internet so they know I’m alive!!” Maybe you’ve noticed. Now that I have some time and I’m not worried about my battery dying, I’ll give a more detailed description. This is mostly a stream of thought about what I’ve learned, to give you a rough idea about Mongolia if you are like I was and know little about it. Admittedly some of this is probably wild generalization, but it is what I have experienced or been told be Mongolians …

This is a continuation of my first post from Mongolia, about the Central region. Look through that first.
I have even less energy to write now than I did three days ago, but since I will only have wifi for the next 10 hours (and I hope to sleep for 7 of those), I have no option but to give you a mediocre post. I am tired in a good way, and have been busy horse riding. More on that later. Now here are some photos of my time in the Gobi Desert:

Our ger by …

WOW. Two weeks without internet. Without being able to share and communicate with loved ones, without being able to choose what I would eat and when, without peeing and not worrying about getting it on my boots.
Two weeks of beautiful, beautiful nothing, with wild horses and camels everywhere, with new friends. I’ve eaten mutton (sheep and goat), camel, camel cheese curd, drank fermented horse mare milk (and declined eating horse innards). I have developed a stomach for vodka. I have been warmed by horse dung fires. I can tell the difference between a …