Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia – 09/24 (afternoon)

(Michelle) After a hardy lunch of mystery tough meat with thick fat noodles and potatoes (which other than the hardness of the meat was actually pretty tasty), we went on a horseback ride with our non English speaking horsemen of the house. Actually, we never heard him speak Mongolian either, he was a man of few words, but he did speak quite well to the horses – “chew”. I don’t know what “chew” means, but whenever the horseman said it, the horse did what he wanted. TJ tried to use this tactic as well, but he must have been off a little on the intonation at first, because the horse didn’t listen to him. This was especially frustrating for TJ when his horse wouldn’t stop walking right behind mine and mine had gas.

Towards the end of the horse ride, my horse had enough and decided to stop for a water break at the “ger hotel” behind the rock from our place. I don’t know if that water was supposed to be drinking water for people or not, but nobody saw my horse dip his nose in it. Ooops. I couldn’t get my horse to go anywhere, so finally Mongolian horseman came back with his “chews” and we finally made it back to camp. TJ tried to speed up the process by scaring the horse, nearly killing me in the process. This was not appreciated by me or the horseman.

That night, we wrapped ourselves up for the cold sleep in the tent. We had the fire for when we went to sleep, but there was no fire by morning and thus, it got a bit chilly in there, although not as cold as I had feered. We were sharing the ger with Richard from England. We would run into Richard 2 more times in China.

(TJ) Let me just say I don’t think the horses we got were the pick of the litter. They pretty much just followed the horse that was in front of them regardless of what the other horse was doing. The ride only really got fun when I figured out that I could use part of my reins as whip along with the “CHU… CHU” to get my horse moving. So the second half of the ride was much better, Michelle however never really seemed to master her beast. They were constantly wandering off in different directions.

We decided to head back the next day since there was not a lot of stuff to do other than chase horses, look at scenery and freeze, especially if you don’t have long underwear like me.