Sorry for the Group Email

So there isn’t much to do in Ulan Batar. That’s fine. After all, the people are nice, the weather’s good (by which I mean it’s still -10. It’s just that it’s sunny as well), and there are lots of nice places to eat. For those there for more than a few days, though, not going to see the great Mongolian outdoors would be a bit like going to Blackpool and not pretending you’re having a fantastic time in the driving rain.

Mongolia is an incredibly rugged-looking place. It’s not just the hills and mountains surrounding its towns, worn down by thousands of years of erosion; its people are unbelievably hardy. They’d have to be, of course. In winter the temperature drops to minus 40 and worse; in summer it soars to the mid-thirties. That would be bad enough if you lived in a house, so imagine what it would be like in a tent.

With my increasingly-famous knack for saying “yes” to something before really thinking about it, we went to find out. Tourist ger camps are increasingly popular with foreigners keen to find out what it’s like living in a tent when you’d die of exposure in less than half an hour outside, and our guide book was reassuringly upbeat. It wouldn’t really be like an expedition, it said. There would be western toilets and a restaurant. In fact, I thought, we probably wouldn’t even know we were outside at all.

One day, I suppose, I’ll stop being wrong about everything, but that day doesn’t seem to be as much as a blip on the horizon at the moment. The toilets were the most instantly-striking feature. Imagine, if you will, three planks of wood laid next to each other, lengthways, on the ground. Now build a tiny hut around them. Now dig a six-foot deep pit and remove the middle plank. Congratulations, you’ve just built a ger toilet.

The tents themselves, however, were stunning. We stepped inside from the minus twenty weather into something approximating a sauna. An iron fireplace in the middle of the ger keeps the temperature well into the high twenties, and we fell asleep almost instantly.

The restaurant wasn’t a facsimile of a ger. It actually was a ger. Rather, it was two pushed together, one with a kitchen and the other with tables and, incongruously given the weather, a fridge.

If you’re out farming all day in properly sub-zero temperatures, you’d want a good, stodgy diet, and that’s exactly what we got. Tough meat that took literally minutes to chew through, and noodles half an inch thick in every dimension mean it was impossible not to fill up almost instantly. Even Mendy was catered for with a half-way decent variety of vegetarian noodles and dumplings.

We were careful, of course, not to over-eat or over-drink. Nothing sounded worse than waking at three in the morning and needing to locate your outdoor gear and stumble through the snow to the outhouse.

In the end, we did wake at three o’clock in the morning the first night, but it wasn’t because of the food. Our fire went out almost as soon as we closed our eyes, and

I woke shivering. If it hadn’t been pitch black I’m sure I’d have been able to see my breath. It was silent in the ger. I assumed everyone else was already dead from hypothermia. Gingerly I opened the hatch to the fire and had a look. There were some promisingly orange embers, but nothing was actually on fire.

Cursing our decision to go camping in Mongolia, I began piling wood into the burner. It sat there, stubborn and cold. I had a brainwave. I would blow on it. That would help!

I puffed hard into the fireplace, and was rewarded with a face full of choking black smoke and soot. A few red sparks shot out into my face and onto the carpet where they smouldered threateningly. It was, however, too cold not to do anything. I sat there for half an hour, blowing on the fire and praying that we wouldn’t be discovered frozen in position the next morning.

Eventually, a tiny flame licked hesitantly at one of the logs. Overjoyed and delirious from the cold, I named it Robbie. Soon flames were dancing around the wood, which began to crackle and burn. Puffing my chest to no-one in particular and pleased with my Ray Mears-like woodsmanship, I went to bed.

No sooner had I climbed back in than the door swung open, and a man sauntered in. He spent a few minutes poking at the fire (probably dumbfounded by it quality and heat, I shouldn’t wonder), and then tipped in a bucket of coal. Just before I nodded off, I thought: “It’s going to get warm in here.”

Warm doesn’t begin to describe it. The pleasant, high-twenties conditions evaporated, replaced instead with a climate that must have been pushing the mid-thirties. Imagine waking up and discovering that someone has packed you into a crate also full of cotton wool. And then set fire to the wool. It was suffocating.

We stumbled out the next morning, sweating into the snow. We didn’t mind, though. Mongolia is one of the best places in the world for hiking. Every few hundred metres there is a stunning collection of rocks, begging to be climbed. The hills were coated with deep snow (six inches thick in places), and the sky was a pure blue. It’s too cold for rain, of course. We spent long days clambering over ridges, finding progressively better-looking, less-spoiled views over each one. We rode horses (of which more later), and bumped into nomads who were as fascinated with us as we were with them. The temperature was the only thing that was hard to get right. Apparently you can buy a decent horse in Mongolia for under £100. Wait until the warm season and I just might.

Dave has no idea why some browsers drop the right-hand nav bar to the bottom of the screen. I still haven’t recovered from that bloody cold, either. More pictures, as ever, in the Flickr set.