Day three in the desert had us wake up to say goodbye. The previous day we’d come across random biker guy (aka Jack), who is ultimately biking from Russia to Thailand. Our encounter with him at the Energy Centre, led to him being invited to stay at our ger camp. He joined (like the rest of our group) joined the seventeen year old dance party that night. He was an awesome guy, and as travel often goes, it was a short but awesome time partying and hanging out with him.
Our group with Jack
After his departure, we all piled back into our van to head off to what was one of the highlights of the trip: camel ridding. I’m allergic to horses, which are one of the main forms of travel in Mongolia, so I was putting all my faith in these camels. I wasn’t disappointed. It turned out that the people we helped out the day before were breeders whose camels we wold be riding. Before we were rode camels, the female head of the family invited us into their ger to taste some fermented camel milk. The ger was gorgeous, the camel milk….I don’t think it’s something that I’ll drink regularly.
This is the inside of a family ger
This is before I've actually tasted it
Most of us just sipped the milk, but when no one was relishing the thought of finishing the bowl. One of the guys in our group took over and finished it off. With the camel milk done, we were finally going to ride camels. There were only two camels that we were able to ride, all the others were babies and too small to hold us. So the four of us alternated, with me being one of the first two to ride.
The best way to describe riding a camel is as follows: it isn’t smooth, rather jolty and going up and down is something akin to riding a mechanical bull, you just hang on for dear life as you get thrown forwards and backwards. I loved riding a camel. It’s something so different from home and even from everyday life in Ulaanbaatar.
There was just so much camel love going around.
As always, our time with the camels was a little too short. And before we knew it we were being pushed back into the van with lots of dried camel milk to snack on (even less tasty than the fermented camel milk).
Our other major stop for the day was White Sands. These are the biggest sand dunes in the East Gobi. It was such a gorgeous day that we spent an obscene amount of time hanging out on the dunes.
Definitely the best day of the Gobi Desert.
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