The nine westerners on the tour used Russian military saddles, which are pretty much english without the padding. In fact my saddle was old and buckled in the center. By half way through the trip everyone was trying to figure out a way to pad their saddle. No one did.
After our ride each day we would arrive to a fully set up camp. The wranglers and cooks who had gone with the Camels built their ger and our tents. Tea and cookies would be served a half hour after arrival. We were all starving from the days ride and the cookies (everyone got two and no more) would go fast. Then we would sit and enjoy Lipton black tea with powdered milk until dinner.
Dinner was a four course meal. Salad, always cabbage with a mayonaise dressing, a soup, you never knew what was coming and often not even after it had left, a main course, some sort of meat and rice dish, then dessert, canned fruit and whip cream. After dinner we would fight to stay awake until at least nine thirty. One night we played a very competitive game of Old Maid. Another we drank Mongolian vodka and Fanta in the Greeks tent. Two nights I passed out right after dinner, unable to keep my eyes open because of the thirteen hour time difference and vigrouse ride. The sky, on clear nights, looked like the planetarium.
The Climate:
"It is sunny two hundred and sixty day of the year, you know." Our fellow traveller, Fredrick, would tell us every morning. "This must just not be one of them, eh." In our eight days of riding we saw one day of perfect blue sky. One day we rode through a freezing rain storm. The other six days were somewhere in-between, ranging from ninety degrees in the flat deserts to seventy five in the mountains. At night it was always cold and damp, with the sound of horses munching grass and snorting.
The Massive Gobbi:
We rode for around five hours every day. This included many gallops, some lasting as long as thirty minutes. We saw softly rolling hills covered in green and gold grasses with pale blue Sharply peaked mountains in the distance. We walked through a pass where red, sand colored boulders were piled up on either side of us blocking out the sun. We cantered passed giant sinewy mountains that rose out of perfect pasture land. We saw thick green grass that lead up to salt ponds with sand dunes in the distance. A lake where ducks, black silhouettes against the bright morning sun, covered the silver surface while horses waded in the shallows. Miles of perfectly flat land covered in dark green desert scrub. On the map, we saw less than my pinky nail of the Gobbi.
The End:
At the end of our trip, filthy, exhausted and worn out, the nine of us bumped along in a bus with big wheels over a dirt road taking us out of the Gobbi. We all had funny sun burns, sore bodies and an undeniable wish to return as soon as possible.
