Ulzii is our contact in UB for Medics2Mongolia, our teaching project in the hospital. She is about our age, possibly the best English speaker in the whole country, and bonkers in the best kind of way.
We love her already and we would genuinely be lost without her. She set up the teaching project, communicated with the doctors (who don’t speak any English at all), and advised us on how to get out and about in UB.
It also turns out that Ulzii is really outdoorsy! Brilliant! She invited us to come walking with her friends at Bogd Khan, the nearby national park South of the city. Yes, please! It was nice to not have to pay for a guide, and to be able to meet people our own age.
So, Sunday, 6am start, at the car park for 7am (ouch). We met a couple of Ulzii’s friends and realised that there were about 15 people on the walk – brilliant! We split up between the cars and introduced ourselves to Ulzii’s friends (mainly students, guides etc) and set off for Bogd Khan.
The start of the walk went very smoothly. It was COLD. Alex had forgotten his coat in the boot of the car (he would come to regret that later), and we lost the actual path within about 20 minutes of starting. Cue three hours of clambering over icy, slippy, unstable boulder fields, in light snow, at zero degrees.
Occasionally the group would stop to argue about the route to take (there were no paths) and we would get the gist of the conclusion based on who strode off most convincingly in any direction.
I was getting worried about my knees, which I’ve had problems with, whilst Emily took regular tumbles and lightly sprained her ankle, and Alex’s core temperature was probably ten degrees lower than it should be. So, he donned my extra green jumper and bright red scarf, and Ulzii’s blue blanket. The look was priceless.
As you might be able to tell, we were a bit worried about how this was all going to end. I was catastrophising about how we would survive a night on the hill at minus twenty degrees, and whether I could use our mobiles and the sat device to coordinate a rescue… Type 2 fun indeed…
Anyway, eventually we got out of the forested boulder fields and caught a view of UB in the distance. This gave us a much needed orientation point, and after that Ulzii knew exactly where we needed to go to find the top of the hill (more-or-less).
We were very relieved to feel less lost, but in the back of our minds was the worry that we would have to repeat our crawl across the icy boulders on the way back. The views were fabulous though, and it was great to be out in the wilderness.
Thankfully, the path from the summit back the way we came was very clear. There are basically no good maps available in Mongolia, apart from some 1:100,000 scale old Soviet maps which don’t have recent paths marked.
Navigation amounts to following a guide or using a GPS. So, while we really should have planned the route in advance, there is only so much you can do.
Relieved that we were back on track, the descent was much less stressful and more about enjoying the scenery and the (blissfully boulder-free) path. We exited the conifers into a beautiful meadow with a stunning view of the valley below.
Ulzii was very apologetic about the whole getting lost thing, but we reassured her that it had been an awesome first adventure into rural Mongolia! What a start! Back in the car, I managed to stay awake for about 10 seconds, as did Alex, leaving Emily in the back, bored, for two hours. All in all, a superb start to our elective in Mongolia.
The Mongolia Ambulance Project 