Cows to the left of me, horses to the right

 Stuck in the middle with you. The caravan is off. We left the hostel at 8 am, picked up a few last minute things and hit the road in apparently record time for one of these expeditions. It took forever getting out of UB, but once we did, the countryside is beautiful. Rolling hills

and barren of trees. Horses and cattle and sheep and goats roaming in herds everywhere. Unfortunately the sides of the highway are littered with plastic trash.It’s such a beautiful country, but humans have taken a terrible toll on the planet everywhere with our overconsumption and production of garbage. Mongolia is no exception. 

Down down down south we went until we got to a small town and decided to grab dinner so that we could camp without having to deal with food for the night. All over the countryside there are trucks hauling pod houses for tourist camps. Great big flat bed trailers carry these white rectangular space-age pre fab structures with polarized plexiglass on either end and a door in the middle. They’re Chinese made, hauled into UB by train, and then distributed eveywhere. 

That’s not where we stayed. We wandered off the main road near this small town, past a ravine used informally as a dump, past the actual dump that was smoldering with burning plastic, and off to a hillside to pitch our tents. Now that I am settled on a grassy plain along a lake surrounded by desert flowers, I am certain there were better options than the subtle aroma of decaying livestock hauled to the dump to return to the earth faster than the tons of plastic. But it was a place to lay in rest in my tiny solo coffin tent, which I love dearly.

Today we made it to Dalanzagdad, the capital city of the Omnogovi province, and we passed a truckload of camels along the way. By ‘truckload’, I mean both a figurative truckloack, because there are over 300,000 camels around here, but also a literal truckload. A truck was parked along the side of the road with at least 60 camels sitting peacefully in the trailer. Sitting. It was astonishing to see their little bulbous noses and thick eyelashes peeking over the edge of the trailer. They make a soft chittering noise like baby geese that I certainly wasn’t expecting. 

They were stopped because of an asshole camel that somehow got out of the truck and was tucked in on the side of road like he couldn’t be bothered to cooperate. The driver at one point shoved him, and he screamed in disdain at the insult. They were waiting for a crane to come to lift this one errant camel back into the trailer so that they could be on their way to the races. Literally. We weren’t able to stay long enough to see the camel lifting, but I presume there was more screaming at the affront.

We made it into DZ to get the local permit, and then suddenly realized that it’s Saturday and the offices are closed. A few well-placed phone called, because apparently that’s how it works, and Bob’s your uncle. Off we go to the first collection site, after another road side sleep. By tomorrow night, there should be jerboas.