Day 406 - Quarter of a century

We were woken nice and early at 5.40am by the father of the ger we were staying in, who came into our ger to fetch some water and grunted in surprise to find people still sleeping at this hour in the morning - Adam had to get up and fill the water pot for him, and then got to see the sunrise. After a relaxed start to the day we set off around 10am to a cold water spring nearby, that is the lifeline for this part of the desert. Here is was cool to see water, lush green grass with horses grazing, and huge white sand dunes in the background. The spring was freezing cold, that it was too hard to resist lapping it up like the other animals! Back at camp we prepared for our camel ride, but Liv ended up staying behind and playing with the cute little kitten resident in our ger. The camel riders came back earlier than planned, as no one particularly enjoyed the ride on the stinky, unresponsive, wobbly animals - though it was cool to walk over some sand on a camel! After lunch we located a drunken Bimba to drive us to the highest sand dune (about 300m high) - it turns out he can drive just as drunk as he can sober - luckily there are not too many cars around in the desert! We spent the rest of the afternoon labouring our way up the sand - for each 2 steps you took, you slided back one! But our efforts were well and truly rewarded when we hit the summit and got the 360 degree view of the Gobi Desert. Amazing.
We spent hours playing like kids at the top - doing flips and jumps, and rolling our way down. At one stage we thought we could hear jet planes, but the noise was actually the thundering sound of millions of sand particles racing down the dunes. By the time we made it to the bottom again, we were covered in sand - it had found its way into our hair, eyes, noses, ears, underwear - you name it!

We then drove to a tourist camp we had seen from the top of the dunes, where we found cold beer and ran into the yaks. They told us how they had been lost / stuck in the desert for the last 3 days, and we all thanked our lucky stars that we had Bimba the Great as our driver!

We ended up moving gers, because the yaks had somehow taken ours, but we (especially Sylvie) were happy because our new ger was super cosy with no fermenting milk in sight! At this ger we met some other travellers and had a taste of their Genghis Khan vodka, as well as trying some interesting spiced goats blood and liver.

Apart from the goats blood and liver, it was an absolutely perfect birthday day for Liv - it's not often you spend your birthday in the middle of the Gobi desert!!

Adlibing the dunes.