Tarialin, Khovsgol – 25 February11 and a half hours in the car – only one stop of about 30 minutes for lunch. The mountains and snow give epic views, and occasionally there are spindly dry forests. The streams and rivers are starting to melt. They are icy blue-green, slushy on the edges. The big sky feels familiar from Australia and the openness of the landscape is refreshing after the apartment blocks of the city. The tarmac ends about halfway through the day and we bounce along on dirt roads. In most places there is an official gravel road, but the going is easier on the steppe itself, so we move from wheel marks to wheel marks with a constant discussion about which ones may be the smoother ride (like the grass is always greener, the other road is always better). It feels like we are miles from anywhere, but at each soum (district) centre there is mobile phone reception so I can send Chris regular text messages during the day. We are staying in the town “hotel” – a crumbling two –story building with no running water or plumbing. We have electricity and heating though and it is warm. I survive my first encounter with a pit toilet in sub zero temperatures.
We went to the ADRA coordinator’s house, Sovd, for a snack. Her house is two rooms built around the stove. It is toasty inside. She serves us bread, crunchy curds (a lot of effort to eat without much reward, like chomping on dried lasagne sheets) and some sweet thing that is sour cream mixed with sugar and left outside to freeze. We then walked to a small “café” for dinner proper. Being vegetarian means that there is always a long discussion about what to feed me. Eventually I was given a bowl of rice topped with sliced gherkin and pickled carrot and capsicum. It is the end of winter here and fresh food is hard to come by. Dinner was finished off with a drink of warm milky curds with sugar and butter. Not as bad as it sounds, but not so good either. The curds give it some bite and I could only handle a few mouthfuls. My dinner was T500 – about 45 cents.We walked back to the hotel. It was very cold, very dark. Above us the clear sky was full of bright stars.
