In Bolod we trust

After a days wait at the Russia-Mongolia -border we finally got to continue to Mongolia, the land of the Chinggis Khan and the humble nomads. It really says a lot about a country, that the best thing ever happened to it was Stalin's communism and that it still seeks mental guidance from a guy who lived in the 10th century.

Basically the capital Ulaanbaatar was an over-grown tent-village of about 1,2 million people (2008).    

The man sitting on the ground was Mr. Bolod. He was our beloved tour-guide who also offered one of his apartments for us to stay in. Unfortunately one of our group-member took the only set of keys for the apartment with him back to Finland, so Bolod's accommodation-business got messed up for the season.

Bolod showed us a set of bizarre sights, such as this old Mongolian army barrack. No idea, why this was relevant. Although, it's quite funny and sad at the same time, that there appears to be a person living in front of the abandoned barrack in a yurt.

A spectacular show on how to wool a lamb was displayed to us western city-people by the nomad's. Very exciting stuff! 

The gentleman on the right is Colonel Friday, a fundamental communist with a very short fuse. He enforced obsessively that we'd eat every dairy meal and snack that was offered us by the nomad people. While gagging down some yoghurt-dumplings one of our group-member was able to distract the Colonel by putting a peace of paper to the nomad-stove. That was a great insult for the nomad culture, because the stove was only allowed to be heated up with sacred cow-manure. During the distraction, we were able to get rid some of the force-feeded food by throwing it under the yurt's rug.

A typical nomad dish looked like this. Looks pretty delicious right? Well, when you eat this stuff 365 days a year three times a day, like the nomad's for sure eat, you might consider ordering a pizza.

At this corner of the world people tend to have some weird habits. Whereas chinese people burb and fart a lot to improve their digestion, mongolian people spit to improve their... well... they just spit. The habits make them fun people to hang-out with, especially in closed compartments such as trains or cars. 

In Ulaanbaatar we spent an evening at the Chinggis Beer Club. We encountered a serious liquidity problem when the electricity went off at the city and no card payment was possible. We had no cash and the bill was 123.800 tökröks.

Luckily we had a solution for the problem. We just kept on ordering more drinks until the electricity would come back on and a card payment would be possible again.

Also in Mongolia the back-seat boys were sleepy.

There was a horrendous silver statue of the Chinggis Khan standing in the middle of the desert. It was quite obvious that it was built there just that Mongolia would have something for the tourists in the middle of the desert. We didn't fall for that touristic crap and turned our backs on the stupid thing. 

At the nomad-camp Bolod told us, that there might be a shaman sitting at the top of the nearby hill, and that the shaman might wanna meet us. Bolod encouraged us to climb to the hill and see for ourselves. Well we climbed and there was no shaman, but at least we got to do some top-class power-fisting at the top.

At the edge of the Gobi-desert. We crossed the Gobi-desert at night time and decided it would be a good idea to leave the cabin's window open for the night, because it was so hot. During the night, there was a sand storm raging in our cabin, but everybody were too tired to close the window.

Can you spot two of our former friends from this decorative Mongolian restaurant cabin? Yes, you're right, there is Jens and Borreliosis-Peter. We saw them again in Ulaanbaatar, and especially Jens was surprised, not happy, that we're alive after our epic travelling in Russia. 

Don't be fooled by the sarcastic tone of this Mongolia-post, because it really is a wonder, that there are living, breathing and spitting people in this isolated part of the world. For that, Mongolia deserves some god damn respect.   

Vodka, njet Voda!

In 2011 from May to June it was time to do the ultimate trip - Transsiberian train-ride from Finland to China via Russia and Mongolia. Our plan also included an extra twist - four days in North Korea (DPRK). This was no trip for beginners, so all six of us were mentally prepared for things to go sideways.

The first train leg took us from Helsinki (Finland) to Moscow (Russia) with the legendary Tolstoi-train. Somehow we managed to get some Russian guys to buy us a bottle of vodka. Drinking vodka was a good idea, because communicating with Russian people tends to be lot easier with vodka.

In Moscow we did some mandatory, but boring, sightseeing.   

The colour of the day in Moscow was pink.   

At the Moscow-river near Kremlin we bought round-trip tickets to a riverboat, but apparently we couldn't understand any russian and so the boat took us only one-way to somewhere. Nevertheless the sights were nice.    

Moscow had some military police patrolling the streets and they'd came out of the closet big time.

From Moscow the journey continued to Krasnoyarsk. This time the duration on tracks was astonishing three nights and days. During the journey, we met two nice gentlemen from Denmark, Jens and Borreliosis-Peter. To bond with the danish father-son duo we first had to spoil their chances with two French ladies making conversation with them in their cabin.     

The restaurant cabin divided the train into two sections. It was quite stupid to get stuck on the other side of the train after the restaurant cabin closed and your sleeping cabin was on the other side of the train.

Along the tracks were numerous stations where one could spot unique Russian females.

At some random station in Siberia the guys had about 5 seconds time to pose on the tracks before a train came.

The most important thing at the stops was to get some liquid dinner, Baltika-beer.

Sometimes, when there was nothing to see or do on the train, these guys thought it would be amusing to mimic the mating call of a moose in the middle of the night. 

When we arrived in Krasnoyarsk we got to sleep in a flat arranged by our local contacts. The guys were more than pleased with their sleeping arrangements. It could've been worse.

The kitchen-contractor of our flat had forgotten to put screws on in the kitchen's middle shelf, but as you can see the screws were pointless. Although, I wonder how much weight you could put on that shelf. This minor detail was nothing compared to the fact, that there was no central heating in the city at that time. We took the ultimate challenge and showered ourselves in the ice-cold shower, which had it's water delivered straight from the Arctic Ocean.

In Krasnoyarsk we met a lovely couple, Maxim and Natalia. We spent an evening at some nice hills looking down on the mighty river Yenisey.

In this picture some cool guys are smoking genuine mahorka at Krasnoyarsk.

Maxim turned out to be a total maniac and one night he lured us into a deathly trap. He told us to climb a fucking steep cliff with no safety equipment. Unfortunately the cliff was too steep to climb and we had to go down the same way we came. We were hoping for a helicopter rescue, but we were in Siberia, so we had to defy death by climbing down the wall of death.      
     

The next train leg was from Krasnoyark to Irkutsk. We took a risk and bought the cheapest tickets from the 3rd class, with all the common people. The risk was worth it, because it made us drink again (a lot). In the restaurant cabin we met a debt collector from the infamous Russian mafia. We had a nice conversation with Dimitriy by pointing words from a dictionary.

During the epic train leg we also met few other interesting people. One of them was Nasty, a Russian teenager with pyjamas and a whole lot of vodka in her system. 

 

Nasty's mom Cool Cat was also lot's of fun.

 In the next morning a miracle happened and we woke up at the right station - Irkutsk.

After the train ride we found a van and started a death rally towards the spiritual peace of land in the middle of lake Baikal called Olkhon Island. 

Olkhon was a paradise on earth, but it had a dirty secret hidden in the woods. 

Pertti was a cold-blooded travel coordinator from Finland, that we met during one of our most disoriented moments in Irkutsk. Without Pertti and Pertti's slovenian mistress Susku we would've never made it to Olkhon from Irkutsk. For that we had to endure Pertti's jokes and stories the whole time we were on Olkhon.

There is a logical explanation for this one. It looks like two dwarfs with wet clothes were lying here, but actually two drunken travellers pissed these figures. Who would've guessed?

Russian banja-experience was a weird one. Sauna was hot as hell and for extra price they offered sauna-broom, which was made from a pine-tree and which we bought of course. After banja we had some painful burn-marks on our ass and pine-tree-needles stuck to our testicles. Sensuel experience to say the least.

A trip to Baikal is worth nothing without swimming naked in it.

One of the most disturbing episodes on Olkhon was, when we witnessed two drunken comrades trying to land their boat into Baikal. They ended up landing their truck into the water also.

Marshutka - a Russian supertruck. You could literally lit the Marshutka on fire and drive it down from a cliff and it could still do it's job as an off-road vehicle. We took a days ride with Marshutka to the island's north coast and for some reason stopped to eat pine-tree needles.

Khuznir was a village in Olkhon of about 1.200 people and a few electric lights. While searching a night club from the village we found a couple of local mongolian gang-bangers. We had interesting discussions with them, mainly about fighting with people and shooting them.

To sum up the Russian experience, I have to say that in order to visit Russia you must be ready to face near death experiences, impossible language barrier, crazy unlogical behaviour from locals and some serious vodka-drinking. In other words, Russia is a perfect country to travel!