Burden In My Hand

Travel in Mongolia SUCKS! It hurts, especially if you are tall. I came in straight from Ulaanbaatar some weeks ago to my village down in Dundgobi by way of 5-seater jeep. Guess how many people actually were in it? 16. It was supposed to be a ~12 hour ride.

So we leave 05:30. The jeep busts two tires and the engine dies at the only [food] stop in the middle of nowhere. We eat and wait a few hours. We hire another driver and get on our way late afternoon. This jeep gets a flat. Then the driver gets lost. The compass and map have yet to be invented. So it's midnight and we should have been there already. You can't navigate in the dark so we all pile into a herder's ger and spend the night. We find our way home the next morning. Being like a sardine in a can killed my back the next day. All the while, I am sitting next to a presumably gay teenager who won't stop trying to put his hand on my genitals. I was infuriated. I have no problem being friends with gay people and hanging out, just don't be fondling me.

And now this trip to the 3 day music festival. It actually wasn't so bad because it was "only" 9 of us and it was great company which meant great fun and laughs. An axle or something broke two hours out and luckily we had a piece of wood (initially for the tent) we sawed and used to uphold the vehicle until we made it to the next village. Then we borrowed a friend's axle and went on our way. Mongolians are very good at MacGyverism, they can widdle their way out of so many things. On our trip back, the car kept choking and our driver kept hammering away at the thing and somehow we managed to get home after many stops. Oh, and occasionally somebody has a bottle of vodka...so yeah, that part about drowning yourself in alcohol in the desert...'tis true.

"...follow me into the desert as thirsty as you are,

crack a smile and cut your mouth and drown in alcohol,

'cause down below the truth is lying beneath the riverbed,

so quench yourself and drink the water that flows below her head..."