Mongolia - Tsagaan Suvarga

Standing on the cliffs of Tsagaan Suvarga

Day two we continued south about 200km through Dundgovi Province to our next destination. Tsagaan Suvarga means "White Stupa" - so called because the cliffs are said to look like stupas from a distance. It is a 200m tall and 400m long escarpment of soft rock, striped white, pink, red and orange. It was such an amazing place! The views of the hills from the top of the cliffs was really incredible. And through the day on our drive we passed through such different landscapes, from green as far as we could see with mountains in the distance, to open gravelly desert and sandstone cliffs.

After exploring Tsagaan Suvarga for a few hours we drove to our ger camp, located only a few kilometres away. Our camp was so different from the place we stayed the day before: a herd of camels walking around instead of horses, the Tsagaan Suvarga cliffs off in the distance. But still, a lot of garlic chives!

We made a friend at this ger camp: a black dog that was steadfastly ignored and yet followed us around everywhere we went. He even came with us the next morning when we walked the 3km to the edge of the Tsagaan Suvarga cliffs! We called him Daggy Doggy because he had daggy fur on his back. It was fun to watch him scare birds up out of the grass and chase them just a little bit.

Leaving Baga Gazriin Chulu

The road from one place to another is actually usually a series of a few tracks.
You drive on the one in the best condition (sometimes none of the above)

Some of the only waterfowl we saw on our trip. It wasn't until we got home
that we had a closer look and saw they have really interesting markings!
(Haven't been able to identify it yet just with a cursory search.)

Driving by a big horse statue in Mandalgovi. You would see so many animal statues,
even outside of tiny little towns.

Large herd of camels

Mongolia - Baga Gazriin Chuluu

Baga Gazriin Chulu

We left Ulaanbaatar on the first day of our tour, driving south to Dundgovi Province about 260 kilometres to Baga Gazriin Chuluu, a 15 km long and 10 km wide granite stone-mountain. The drive itself was beautiful: green rolling hills and distant mountains, and more horses, goats, sheep, cattle, and camels - yes, even camels! - than we could count in our first day and few hours of driving. And the green hills were covered in flowers. Even before we began our tour our guide told us it had been a very wet summer in Mongolia and in the Gobi which could affect the roads and our itinerary. What we learned very quickly is that a lot of rain means a lot of grazing, and in the middle-Gobi garlic chives as far as you can see.

Baga Gazriin Chuluu was amazing to explore - orange granite rocks emerging from the green steppe almost out of nowhere. We visited a cave where a Buddhist lama is said to have meditated for many years as well as a Buddhist monastery which was destroyed in the Communist revolution of the 1920s. The ruins of the monastery was quite beautiful, hiding in a grove of trees which the monks had planted beneath the rocky cliffs.

Our ger camp for that evening was located near the edge of the mountain, and we walked around the rocks in the afternoon before dinner. After dinner, we watched the glow of the sunset fade and the hills darken into twilight, meandered up the road to see the horses which had come closer to camp as night began to fall. Mars, Venus and Jupiter joined the moon in the sky and we went to sleep. Woke up at dawn to the soft sounds of of paws on the felt roof of the ger: upon investigating, it was a cat! It was the only one I saw throughout our trip.

Before breakfast we took a walk, watching the horses run and fight over the hills under dramatic clouds. It was another start to another beautiful day.

Coming into spring

We arrived back in Australia last week Tuesday evening, and it has nice to come back to a beautiful warm, sunny spring days! Our first plum tree was in full bloom, spring bulbs coming up, peach trees blossom, and all sorts of spring blossoms around town. We now have daffodils and today our other plum tree blossoms opened up in the warm weather - it has been quite superb. There were 20mls in our rain gauge when we came back and have had a couple of showers, so things are actually greening up a bit.

Walking home after work

Dramatic spring skies

New plum blossoms

The process of going through our Mongolia photos is quite daunting, but I am resolved to have something posted for every place we visited, or at least for every day of our trip (and our tour was 16 days, so there is a lot to come). It may take a while though - there is a lot to do at home and I started my new job as soon as we got back, but I will not stop halfway through this time ;) (the way I did with Japan and our Victoria roadtrip... still working on those!)