Wonky Bridge & Moron

We woke up the next morning and thankfully it had stopped raining. We were having our fried egg breakfast whilst sitting on a log, when the two boys from the previous night came back. Guess what - yes they had bought more cheese for us and some fresh milk - yes straight from the cows (or Yaks we are not sure). We of course paid them for that and were very grateful again although we didn’t know if they were just hankering for another toy car. They stayed for a fried egg sandwich which you could tell the one boy didn’t like at all but was too polite to say so. Then they let us have a go on their horse before riding off back home. We all took our turn to wash in this beautiful river and do the odd bit of laundry in it too. You really couldn’t ask for a more beautiful setting once again. Later as we were just preparing to leave, they turned up again! this time with something that tasted like goats-cheese vodka - it was foul! We let the driver deal with that one as none of us liked it and we quickly got in the car and drove away before they found anything else to sell us! Joking apart, the cheese and milk were lovely. We set off again to a day of more stunning scenery and bumpy roads. We were on our way towards Hovsgul National Park which has a beautiful lake there too and is famed for its riding. To get there we had to take a road north which crossed this big river. As we approached the river - and the bridge crossing it - it didn’t quite look right. It wasn’t until we got up close we could see exactly what was wrong. Uh oh!! This bridge was well wonky!! Ok so none of us wanted to stay in the car as it drove over as we could see parts of it were definitely up and down hill and quite steep in places. If there had been any other vehicles around I think we would have sat still and watched them do it first but we were all too chicken, so we all got out & walked and left Teleh to drive the van over it. He took it very slowly and as we walked across we could see huge holes and look right down into the river. Needless to say we all made it safely to the other side but it was when we were safely over and we looked back, we could see that some of the bridge supports were completely missing where the river had washed them away! So on we drove through more beautiful scenery. Yes I expect you are getting bored about hearing how beautiful it all was now. You have to remember though, this beautiful scenery was a full 360 degrees around us for 2,500km. It just went on forever and didn’t disappear when you got over the hill. We drove on to the town of Moron and to a supermarket so we could stock up on groceries (ie pasta, eggs, hot chocolate & vodka). It was a strange town and there were people on horses at the ATMs which was quite funny. As we were leaving Teleh tried to tell us something - remember he only speaks Mongolian & Russian. We managed to work out that he was saying there was a Naadam Festival happening in Moron. So of course we changed direction and headed over to it. It was obviously much smaller than the one in Ulaanbaatar but it had pretty much the same feel to it. The wrestlers wore the same costumes, the archers were all in their finery and there were people on horses everywhere. The stalls were much more of your local trader variety too selling vegetables (a real rarity in Mongolia), leather goods and clothing. Then we spotted the deathtrap! it was a Mongolian fairground ride which had a rail about 20 feet up in the air. You sat in a little cart and peddled your way along this rail. Of course we had to have a go and no way would anything like this be allowed anywhere other than here but it was really funny as the Mongolians treated like high rise bumping cars. So fun over and off we went again all Naadam’ed out!