20 Aug Resting in UB Mongolia
Lived it up for a couple of days at the posh Chingghis Khan hotel, site of the finish line, as we reveled in soft beds, hot showers, and cold beer. It was great to get to see other teams come in as we cheered them on. Some of their stories are downright terrifying.
You don’t realize the toll it takes on your body to sit for the better part of a month with no real exercise until you get out of the bus and just walking with your gear up some stairs makes you feel exhausted. Plus it would appear we all have been operating on a sleep deficit measured in days, not hours.
All this is to say we have very little to show for our couple of days this far in UB. We laid around Thursday afternoon, did nothing on Friday by go out for dinner and to the big finish line party, and on Saturday took ourselves to the Lotus Centre to meet some of the staff and kids.
The finish line party was good time, and we started with a great meal at the Irish place downstairs. Sarita came up with a great fundraising idea for the lotus Centre, which was to ask people to donate money for the privilege of drinking out of her filthy Converse tennis shoe. It was as hard to explain to them as it is now, to be honest.
Our first enthusiastic donors were a group of very nice guys from the Alaska National Guard, who come every summer to Mongolia to work with local military. Not all of them drank from the shoe, but they all gave us cash to help the orphanage.
At the party, there was a bottle of vodka on each table, which we used in our quest for victims of the “Chuck Taylor Challenge”. Surprisingly, nearly all the folks we asked were willing, but none were so generous or enthusiastic as the guys from A Baatar World and Team Venture. As a bonus, we also got Adventurist Chief Rob Mills to drink twice from the shoe, once on stage as he gave us an award. The award consisted of a giant bucket of fried chicken, for our “inventive” fundraising methods.
We moved over to the Lotus Guest House, owned by the orphanage, and while it isn’t as fancy as the Chinggis, it is a lot cheaper per night and quite clean and nice. Plus it is closer to the middle of the city.
Our afternoon at the Lotus Centre was wonderful. We took out bus out to visit the bright and cheerful campus, which took about an hour to reach in the insane UB traffic. Set in a valley with pretty mountains all around, the orphanage has nice permanent buildings as well as traditional gers for the kids to stay in. The elementary school is well-stocked with English-language and Mongolian books, and the classrooms are neat and colorful. We met the current volunteer director, Will, and his wife, as well as the very kind Suugii, who rode with us out to the center in the bus. They were grateful for the large cartons of school supplies and toothbrushes we brought.
Some of our teammates have gone on excursions to the countryside so for a couple of days it was just Don, Sarita, and I hanging around. We made good use of our time by inventing a new drinking game with the JVC cameras, called the Dixie Chicken Chugalug Cam. The little cameras are waterproof, so we drop them into big mugs of beer and record the chugging. Great way to pass the afternoon and got quite a few folks to join in the fun. Sometimes being grown up is overrated.
We’ve also managed a bit of shopping, a visit to the Gandan Monastery, and slept a surprising amount. Restorative to be off the road. We learned that Caroline is mortally afraid of pigeons when we realized that there are thousands of the birds at the monastery, flicking around all the open spaces. We did not mock her at all for this fear. 😉
On Monday we said goodbye to Stefano and Pietro, our long suffering Italian teammates, who never quite knew what to make of our savage ways when it came to food and camping. We will miss the casual intimacy afforded a group like ours, and will forever feel bonded by our shared highs and lows.
