The sweatiest place on Earth.

I got here [Bangkok] from Brisbane this morning at 6am. I had eighteen hours before my connecting flight back to Madrid so I got a taxi into town. It took an hour and a half because of traffic. The driver played Boney M whilst pointing out banged up cars at the side of the road. I hadn’t realised that his taxi was air-conditioned until he dropped me of at Wat Pho Temple.

The temple houses the country’s largest reclining Buddha (40m x 100m). After a long walk around the temple grounds I wandered the streets, as is now customary (and also hard work as the capital of Thailand feels like a city under a sea of damp cotton wool). The smell is brilliant. There are a thousand and one odours all baying for your attention, most of them sickly sweet or a pleasing rancid smell.

I zipped through kilometres of back streets and markets selling spices and pornography and also wandered past a few shops that I still haven’t got my head around yet. Open fronted rooms with families sitting around eating in front of the TV and people wandering in and out. What were they selling, their left overs?

I found a street comprised solely of guitar retailers, military surplus suppliers and sewing machine shops. how does that happen? It looked like a repeated Scooby-Doo chase scene background. Guitar, boots, sewing machine, guitar, boots, sewing machine, guitar, boots…

The moment came to get back to the airport when I finally came across the ex-pat neighbourhood. The Mecca of friendship bracelets and ethnic clothing.

Tuesday, 29th July.

Eighty-nine days ago I was writing my first diary entry.

This is my last.

I’ll be home in a couple of hours. We’ve been fleeing the dawn for a while now, but the orange line on the horizon is getting bigger and below us there’s scattered clumps of lights and roads. Could be Italy, Afghanistan, Benidorm…

All I wanted to do as I sat on the plane in Madrid waiting to take off for Beijing, was to turn back. Now, three months later, I’m happy to be going home. My last night at Phil’s we watched a film set in Spain. It made me miss home and all things Spanish. Earlier that day me and Phil wandered around a few antique and bric-a-brac shops. I’ll always have fond memories of that.

I don’t know if all this has changed me. I suppose I´ll find out when I get home. I think it has. I’ve certainly practised my handwriting anyway…

Sitting with a tropical rainforest behind me and the Pacific Ocean in front of me.

I arrived at Diane’s (Phil’s friend) place in Cairns yesterday and set off early this morning. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get deeper into Daintree Forest (the oldest on Earth). I’ve decided that Australia is for sitting on the beach, this time around. I’m just going to lie on this deserted beach and ponder about my growing anxiety of flying back.

I’m slouched in a chair at a table in the bar next to the beach. There’s a girl over there doing exactly the same as me, scribbling in a little note book with an anti-social look on her face…only, she’s got a big jug of beer. Being the tit that I am, I forget to get some cash before I set off, so I’ve got a few dollars to last me three days. At least the food is free on the boat tomorrow. I’ll be too busy looking at coral and deadly poisonous marine life to be worried about eating…or will they all look like little cartoon roast chickens floating past my mask?

Thursday, 16th July.

Swam with a turtle.

I’d been snorkelling for an hour or so and he appeared beneath me. I followed him for about fifteen minutes. I almost followed him out of the reef, but seeing I was leaving the boat behind I let him go. I swam a couple of metres above him. His fins moved like wings, it was like watching a bird flying in slow motion.

I’m pretty happy with that.

I spent the rest of the time looking at sea slugs, giant boulder coral, giant clams, sting rays (…was that one following me?), schools of little blue fish and a big b@#%ard fish that I though was a shark. On the way back I laid on the deck in my shorts…like an anaemic Robinson Crusoe.

Friday, 17th July.

Still on the beach.

I was never one for the beach and I do look like a flabby little naked mole rat in the sun, but spending all day here without a soul in sight feels quite…nice. I lost my fear of crocodiles sneaking up on me out of the rainforest very soon after getting here. It’d be a gruesome end, but it’d be a beautiful place to get eaten at least.

There’s no doubt about it, luxury spots make for crap diary entries.

This feels like the official end to my trip. Sitting on a beach next to the world’s oldest forest. I know I go on about it, but this place really was exactly the same a million years ago…except Aborigines were hunting kangaroos out where I made friends with a turtle yesterday. The only niggling disappointment I feel is that I haven’t achieved much. Doing the train journey from Madrid to here would have been a lot harder and I would have missed a lot of Mongolia (the two weeks I’d originally planned would have been heart-breakingly short). But if I were sitting here having got to the far side of Asia over land, I think I would have fulfilled a part of me that at the moment still feels a little annoyed.

I’m going to see our Phil today!

I could possibly be a big disappointment and end up plodding round her house like a zombie with a tick looking for goats to milk…

I finished the book the Australian bloke gave me in Beijing. “Stay alive my son” by Pin Yathay. It’s the story of his escape from Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia and the loss of his family and friends along the way. I was still going over everything in my head when I went though arrivals and almost walked past Phil and Jon. We set off in time to catch the rush hour traffic. I later went to bed with no intention of getting up early to take advantage of the day…

Thursday, 2nd July

I was greeted by a note from my sister (and her two cats Yorkshire & Pudding) and directions to her office. I wandered around Brisbane and started to get nostalgic about Mongolia when the thought dawned on me that I might never go back there. I was suddenly gripped with the urge to just keep going and began to think of where I could go next (all the while cursing the fact that I hadn’t started ten years ago). After living out of my rucksack for two months, sleeping in the middle of nowhere with very little belongings, making conversation with complete strangers everyday, often only with hand gesture, waking up to landscapes I’d never experienced before…I felt out of place. I wanted my sweaty clothes, goat smelling gers and big blue skies.

I found myself going into every bookshop in the city. I nervously started to read bits of books on anything. First travel books, then art books, then anything that came to hand. I knew I was going to be in relative comfort from now on and wasn’t going to be going anywhere for the moment, so frantically reading was a quick substitute.

But later Phil & Jon took me to see some big whales, so that calmed me down.

Friday, 3rd / Saturday, 4th  / Sunday, 5th July

We went to Stradbroke Island. We camped about a hundred metres from the beach. We had duvets, pillows, cool-box, gas stove, temperatures at night above freezing. I wasn’t a stinky nomad any more.

That day went pretty well. We walked through a gorge whilst humpbacked whales, sea eagles, rays, dolphins and turtles all vied for our attention. We’d walked directly into a nature documentary. We had a beer and watched the neon sunset on the squeaky-sand beach. This is more or less what we did for the following two days…which was fine by me. We also spent a while at Amity Point poking an abandoned catamaran, and Phil mas almost moved to tears by a flock of pelicans floating on the wind overhead. She really quite likes pelicans.

Monday, 6th – Tuesday 14th

I laid in. I wandered around Brisbane. Had nice nights in with Phil & Jon. They showed me forests and mount Coot Thar. But it doesn’t seem like stuff to put in a blog, I prefer to spout ill-informed observations about natives…

Got caught in a sudden downpour yesterday whilst looking for somewhere to eat.

The sky turned to a thunderstorm grey/pink that I’d never seen before. Got wet and found a pizza place after half an hour walking, listening to French gypsies on my iPod. Did some more walking and found a bar, had a drink and watched people play pool.

I spent today in the Art Museum of New South Wales. Had a lie down in the park of fruit bats before going in and realised that eighty percent of Sydney’s population are joggers. Do these fitness junkies have jobs? How much do they pay the personal trainers that jog alongside them?

I liked the museum. Four floors of everything from Medieval, Aboriginal, Indonesian right up to Modern stuff, where I had to stop myself touching things, knocking them over and fulfilling the habitual pattern of making a complete dick-head of myself…

Later had dinner in an Asturian place with a French girl from my hostel. The crapness of the food made me miss Spain. We talked a lot, but I can’t remember what about.

I wish I had more time here. It seems pleasant on the face of it. It’s strange being in a foreign country where the natives speak your language. It’s a lot more unsettling than being in Beijing or Ulaanbaatar. I’ve just spent the last three days with a puzzled look on my face, wondering if I’d slipped into a parallel dimension. My brain’s now completely accustomed to not understanding a word people  are saying and the Australian accents that I here in the street get automatically interpreted as someone talking Japanese. My brain takes a few minutes to realise that it’s a language that I can understand.

Walked across the Harbour Bridge and I resisted taking photos as seeing so many people with cameras put me into another tourist-hating mood. I should have explored more of what was on the other side of the bridge (there wasn’t much at first glance), but I didn’t.

Later got a bus to Bondi Beach just before it started getting dark. What makes the sand squeak in Australia? Had crap and expensive fish’n'chips and deep fried Mars bar. Went for a drink with Maude (French girl) and we talked about what a nutter Sarkozy is, her grape picking summers in France and her year working in Dublin. We said goodbye at the hostel and I told her to look me up in Brisbane as she’s travelling up the east coast for two months.

Captain Cook sailed all the way from Whitby to get here. I only flew from Ulaanbaatar…but I bet his journey wasn’t half as f@#&ing annoying as mine.

My plane finally left Mongolia three hours late, which meant that when I finally got to Beijing my connecting flight to Sydney had already left. I had to stop overnight in a hotel along with four others, all at the expense of Air China …although they only agreed to pay for four rooms, “only one room per nationality”. We were all complete strangers and nobody felt like sharing so one of the Americans paid for another room.

The next morning at the airport I learnt what an electronic visa was and that I didn’t have one for Australia. I was directed to a small office where I could use the Internet to apply for one while the staff stuffed their faces and watched TV. I put my bag through what must have been it’s fifteenth dose of x-rays to make sure all my film was properly knackered and boarded the plane for two hours of non-stop, soul destroying turbulence. We landed in Shanghai for a short stop which gave me time to buy what I thought was mineral water but in fact turned out to be bottled sweat, before boarding the plane again for another ten hours…

I joined the quarantine queue at Sydney airport, trembling and swearing never to fly anywhere ever again as the turbulence had been pretty much constant. I then learnt that my little wooden turtle (the only souvenir that I’d bought for myself) might be confiscated after reading the big “$10,000 fine” posters everywhere. Luckily I got through and my turtle was also allowed entry.

So, here I am in the southern hemisphere for the first time. I’ve already had pie’n'peas by the river and walked through a park full of fruit bats, and now I’m sitting by the Opera House in what feels like a big 3D postcard.

What did these people do on holiday before they had cameras?

Friday, 26th June.

I don’t like repeatedly seeing the same faces at an airport. Seeing them often enough, while you’re waiting for your delayed flight, to start giving them a small “ehyup” every time they walk past. It makes me feel as if I were in a disaster film. I’m getting to know all the main characters who will later be going hysterical, screaming, sacrificing themselves heroically or turning nasty and fighting a nun for the last life jacket…

It’s 11:03am. My plane was due to take off in two minutes. I’m sat watching an electronic notice board in Genghis Khan International Airport. When I got here two hours ago they told me that the flight had been put back ten hours to 9pm. I took the news relatively calmly as I had almost expected some sort of f#@k up on arrival. I’d got to the airport in plenty of time and my driver had managed to avoid every one of the heavy goods vehicles on the way by at least a couple of inches…

At the hostel I said goodbye to the remaining few people I’d gotten to know. I’d forgotten or just not bothered to learn the names of all but one of the people who worked there. I said goodbye to Ukhta, shook his three-fingered hand and promised to send him a cassette of decent music. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to “Bob” (one of the family that runs the place), as he was too busy trying to kick the shit out of one of their drivers. As we pulled away and out of the square they were still being held apart.

B@#%@cks, I’m going to miss my connecting flight in Beijing.

“Different Ways to Drink Your Own Piss”.

That was Khuu’s translation of the title of the book she chose in the bookshop she’d shown me. I was looking for souvenirs. It’s quite a common remedy in the Mongolian household for almost anything apparently. Children start off with their mother’s urine then move onto their one.

Khuu had a strange condition when she was little. When she ate meat she’d come out in a strange rash and have difficulty walking. She spent three months on a hospital bed without improvement. She was subsequently sent to her aunt’s house/ger. Her aunt was a qualified nurse and looked after her as best she could. When it was agreed that the medicine that Khuu was being given was having no effect,  she was given a glass or two of her aunt’s urine every day. After less than three weeks, she was cured and the strange illness has never returned.

My last visit was to the Victims of Political Persecution Memorial Museum, housed in the converted house of prime minister Genden. Genden was executed by the communist after refusing to take part in the communist purges of the 1930s. Every room recounts the stories (mostly in Mongolian) of the countless intelectuals, lamas and other “counter-revolutionaries” that were sent to Siberian camps or murdered by the communist regime. The last room contains several skulls from a mass grave, each with its own bullet hole.

It was quite sad saying goodbye to Khuu, Marieke and Tine. They wouldn’t have been an obvious choice for travelling companions, but I think in the end I was really lucky.

I’m glad I got a few days to wander round Ulaanbaatar again.

I saw the Zanabazar Art Museum yesterday and had a drink in the only place that wasn’t shut at 11pm. Also found the Choijin Lama temple. A beautiful place hidden amongst grey soviet blocks and the capital’s only skyscraper.

I saw a Khoomi concert there with twenty others, which I’ll probably never forget. I couldn’t bring myself to take photos or videos.

The inside of the Choijin Temple (or “Temple of Mercy”) is full of the usual grimacing, fornicating, laughing deities along with amazing (and huge) Tsaam masks. But what makes this place special are the walls covered with representations of hell and suffering. Metres and metres of people being dismembered, eaten, drowned, strangled, sodomised, etc,. You end up looking upwards to rest your eyes and are greeted with the sight of imitation human hides hanging like a bat colony from the ceiling.

I went out later with the Marike, Tine, Stefan (German guy), a cockney boy called Eric and a Japanese trainee chef with no english. We talked about religion, poverty, philosophy and where to get a beer after 11pm in Ulaanbaatar.

Got up early and decided to walk up the hill behind the monastery. Sat by an oovi (sacred mound of rocks) and felt sad about having to be heading back.

Got back to the ger, rushed my breakfast and we set off back towards the capital.

On the way I got talking to Marike about her time in Africa. She told me about the demand for the bones of albinos and the slaughter it leads to, the children that are abandoned by their families for being “cursed”, and the story of an African workmate of hers that was denied asylum in Belgium after a five year wait.

We arrived in Ulaanbaatar in the afternoon.

Mende was at the hostal.

He waited ten minutes…before saying “let’s wrestle!”

300km then we camped.

I asked Khuu what Mongolians do (and used to do) with their dead, as I’d realised I hadn’t seen a single cemetery. She pointed a few out to me as we drove. At a distance they just look like one of the many rocky outcrops.

Mongolians normally bury their dead, marking the grave with a gravestone. The site is usually just out of town, on the west facing side of a hill or mountain (facing the sunset). They also sometimes leave the body on a mountain side, to be eaten by wild animals. The faster they are eaten, the faster they are re-born.

Khuu knew of a boy (a friend of a classmate), who hung himself and as a result was refused a burial plot. Eventually his body was left on a mountainside. Nothing touched him and he remained intact (and thus not re-born) for quite some time until a monk finally buried him. I asked about cremation, but she said it wasn’t very common, although one place in Ulaanbaatar recently started doing it.

The night before a Mongolian funeral (which usually take place very early in the morning), the family’s ger is emptied and body is kept there, guarded by two family members. At he funeral, there is usually one specially chosen person incharge. They are selected based on the year when they were born, which must have a four (or multiple of four) year difference from that of the deceased, (e.g. Khuu was born in the year of the dog, so her funeral “boss” has to have been born in the year of the snake or…the horse, I think)

Ukhta should be a getaway driver. We were beinig waved down by the first policeman I’d seen since leavin Ulaanbaatar, whilst leaving a sleepy town. He just drove on by, speeding (without a seedometer) over 300km of holes, bumps, gravel, curves. I’ve learnt not to look at what’s coming, to just look at the view and pretend we’re not close to death. Ukhta has the same idea. He’s usually sending text messages, changing the cassette, messing with god knows what under the steering wheel or just looking at what the shitty back wheel is doing with is head stretched out of the window…

Saturday, 20th June.

Listened to the Mongolian music on my ipod with Ukhta by the fire last night.

There’s a track that start’s with a young boy whispering “Shar budaa, shar budaa”. I asked Khuu what it meant, expecting some ancient greeting or religious chant. It means “millet”.

We  got to Amarbayasgalant monastery at 6pm and were shown round by one of the monks, a fourteen year old boy who was followed around by the key keeper, a nine year old boy. They told us a few things about the monastery, but wasn’t overly enthusiastic. He was impatient to get back to the football match he’d started out front. I’ll come back early tomorrow before we set off back to Ulaanbaatar.

The eldest monk here is twenty three, the youngest is six.

Woke up cold and with the sound of rain on the tent.

Had milk tea with the family in their wooden ger and I saw my first blonde Mongolian baby. She was in the arms of her barefoot father.

The father had the face of a drunk. The same squashed up face that seems to have come from too much smiling, the permanent fake smile and dead thousand mile stare.

We got to our camp site, a clearing in the forest by the lakeside, as storm couds starting to come in over the lake from the west.  Bagi and Ankhar stood in the freezing cold water struggling with a fish which they brought onto the water’s edge after twenty minutes. It tasted gorgeous. After eating and drying ourselves by the fire, we walked out onto the islet in the middle of the lake (which I later discovered has a tide).

As always I wandered off on my own and stayed there for a long time. I’ll probably remember that place for as long as I live. I perched on a partly submerged tree trunk which gave the sensation of being suspended in mid air above the surface of the water I the middle of the massive lake with a steaming pine forest behind me.

In all these amazing places, the same thought always occurs to me. This could be fifty, ten thousand, a million years ago. It would still be exactly the same. Even though I didn’t know it existed, this place is the reason why I came.

Went to bed with hot stones from the bonfire wrapped up in socks stuffed into my sleeping bag. Lightning strikes lit up the inside of the tent like a sun bed and thunder kept me from sleeping. But my feet were warm for once.

Thursday, 18th June.

Rain, fire, rain, breakfast under a tree. Then my last day on a Mongolian horse.

40km up and down, through the thick pine forest that surrounds the lake. Spent most of the day thinking about yesterday.

On the ride back to meet Ukhta, I talked to Khuu about Buddhists and Shamans. She’s not a big believer in Shamanism. She’s from the Gobi (southern Mongolia) and most of the Shamanism still practised in Mongolia is done in the far north on the border with Siberia. She said some of them still travel the country, fortune telling, etc., but only for money, she says.

Khuu was at a ceremony where a woman constantly drank vodka, maintaining herself remarkably well and with the help of a drum went into a trance, speaking in a strange language whilst her father translated. Then a second man did the same, this time speaking in Buryat.

I asked her how serious people are about Buddhism. She said a lot of people (like her father) seem to go through the motions and traditions but are “real” Buddhists. She says they practise it so as not to lose it, rather than living it as a philosophy. Her father taught her and her siblings mantras for different things (illnesses, etc,.), and was quite adamant about them, but he’s not a strict Buddhist at all.

I also asked Khuu if people practised both religions or mixed them. She remembered a friend of her great grandfather (a Buddhist monk), a female monk who took on the restoration of a soviet-destroyed monastery after the revolution, who would talk about some great monk she’d met one week and the next week be talking about some amazing shaman…

Almost came off the road again today. Ukhta got carried away.

I’m in Xatgal, on the edge of Lake Khugsvul (Mongolia’s largest fresh water lake). Xatgal was an important place of passage during the soviet era given its proximity to the Russian border. The place began to grow and buildings were began, then democracy kicked in and everything stopped. Recently the tourist trade turned up and everything started again, although fortunately it’s still not in full swing yet.

It’s a ghost town of derelict hotels, newly built but empty wooden houses, silent fenced streets of small houses (taking the place of gers) and a new Internet cafe run by a nice girl who hangs on the front porch, making it look like the place doubles as a brothel.

Tomorrow we get our horses for the next three days.

Tuesday, 16th June.

The son of the family whose land I’m camping on is hiding around the back of one of their wooden gers. He’s got his dad’s full vodka bottle behind his back. I can here angry mumbling coming from inside.

I’m sitting a few metres from Lake Khugsvul. The clearest and bluest lake I’ve ever seen. It’s bordered by pine forest on every side.

We got here on horseback, led by our guides Bagi and Ankhar. We picked up Ankhar from his ger, a couple of kilometre outside Xatgal. While he got ready, I watched his wife (or sister) preparinig aarul (a rock hard, acidic, yogurty cheese), draining it in a sack to be then dried on the roof of the ger.

I worked out what was bothering me yesterday. It’s the endless stares. It’s awkward being a novelty (or even an annoyance) in a strange country…then it’s funny…then it’s interesting…then it starts to tire . It’s a feeling of being constantly veunerable and having no place to hide or blend in for a while.

I’m going to miss the skies in Mongolia. It was the one image I had in my mind every time I thought about coming. They’re even bigger than they were in my imagination. These heavyweight clouds could beat the shit out of the weakling clouds I’ve seen anywhere else.

I hate f@#%ing mosquitos.

Just got back from the volcanic crater.

I went up the hill a while ago to get a good view of the White Lake, our home for the night, and to get away from the mosquitos. I later went down for a swim. The second I set foot in the water the sun went in. I stood there shivering for half an hour, waiting for it to re-appear. It didn’t.

I later joined my Belgian companions and Khuu and we all ran towards Tine’s camera with knickers on our heads.

Sunday, 14th June.

Today was just a long drive. We’re heading towards Khugsvul Lake, but it’s still a long way off.

I’m getting used to Ukhta’s mannerisms and gestures. I can now distinguish which barmy swerves and sudden/severe uses of the brakes are planned and which are surprises even to him. So I now know, more or less, when to relax and look out of the window and when to sh*t myself. I’m surprised at how fast I’ve become accustomed to riding the tragically bad Mongolian “roads”. We’ve even began to nod off as the minivan jolts us around like rags dolls and our heads crash into the ceiling.

Tonight I slept on a mattress five foot long and the width of my shoulders. I was opposite Ukhta who snored as though he’d been possessed by something vile. I woke up at 4am convinced I’d been possessed and moved my sleeping bag onto the floor and away from Ukhta.

I’m clean for the first time in days.

I’m sat in a hot spring in the middle of nowhere. It was a pretty lazy day. We set off slowly, saw a waterfall then arrived early at the spring. I saw a couple of crows fight off an eagle in mid-air as I entered the ger.

We sat in the spring. Marike told about the saunas in Belgium. She left me there and I got out a long time after. We had a drink and learned some Russian card games from Khuu.

Friday, 12th June.

We left the hot spring and came to Tseserleg at midday. I don’t know why but I like it. It’s a medium-sized town in central Mongolia. I wandered around the market (streets made from large, open-fronted cargo containers), kept going until I got to a hill covered in houses of every colour, next to scub land that had been taken over by horses and yaks.

We stopped for lunch at a roadside place just out of town. On the door was a man with a wolf cub. It was for sale, $150.

Tuesday, 9th June.

Got up, took pictures of the lake, trekked through another very wide valley. Very alpine. It could have been Austria, if it weren’t for all the volcanic rock lying around everywhere.

We ended up by a smaller lake surrounded by yaks. We finished off the vodka by the fire. I waited until everyone went to bed and watched the moon rise then went to the tent and froze for a few hours until morning.

Wednesday, 10th June.

We walked a few kilometres and met up with Ukhta our driver. He was leaning on his minivan in the sun next to him was another driver sitting in the shade of his big army truck. We talked with the other driver for a while about his holiday in Scotland. I asked him if he liked Scottish women and he said they weren’t that pretty and nothing compared to Russian girls, whom he prefers.

As the sun went down and my river-washed underwear hung drying on the side of the ger, we played football with eight kids. The same ones from three days ago plus some neighbours.

The middle one of the three boys, a five-year-old with a blue baseball cap, liked my throwing him up in the air, flipping him, spinning him round, so much that he followed me wherever I went and copied my every move. There was the friendly, eldest girl, (the tough older sister) the one with the boxer’s nose, the hard-worker of the family.

The next was her sister, more or less the same, only more girly. The macho, good-looking boy in full football kit which looked brand new (well, not covered in sheep shit anyway). Two new girls, both about eight. One looked like a gypsy princess or a young Bollywood star in her long red skirt…face and hands covered in snot and muck. She continously inflated a snotty bubble everytime she came over and asked to see the inside of my lip piercing. The other looked more of a city girl in comparison. With whiter clothes and a bit dippy.

Then came the little ones. First a chubby little boy of about two in a grey tracksuit and spaced out teeth who was half scared, half giddy. Then my loyal follower with the blue baseball cap. And finally the licking girl. She walked around for hours, as if in another dimension. Every now and again saying “No, no!” to me with the voice of an angry mother. Tonight she was accompanied by a strange ring of metal that might once have been a bicycle wheel and a small football leaking its sponge stuffing. Two of the smallest girls sat in the mouth of their goal holding onto the toddlers, guarenteeing that we wouldn’t dare take any shots.

Towards the end of the match the licking girl came up to me, gave one look at my piercing and with an expression that suggested approvement and a voice of age-old wisdom said “yes”.

Woke up cold, wet and with the tent being ripped from its moorings by gale force winds.

We drove, stopped at midday in a busy little village of multi-coloured houses. Then the landscape changed. We found ourselves in Narnia.

Yesterday I was sat ontop of the highest sand dunes in the world and now I’m in a ger surrounded by snow-capped peaks and forests. To get here we had to plough through hours of three-foot-deep mud and snow in a landscape that could have been Siberia in the dead of winter. I lost count of how many times our van came close to rolling over…

The ger is in the most beautiful spot yet. We’re surrounded by snow. We spent hours having a snow-ball fight with the kids of the family. Three sisters and their brother. The youngest sister of about two spends her time licking things, the spare bed railing propped up against the ger, the door handle, the golf ball she carries around with her… . The brother got a brilliant shot at at me right in the mouth. As it turned out he’d ran out of snow to throw a while ago and was now using sheep shit. Mongolian children have brilliant aim.

This place is beautiful.

Had camel dumplings and went to bed.

Monday, 8th June.

Said goodbye to the English blokes, the French bloke and Terei (one of the drivers) that had up until now accompanied us. They took off on horses with Mende (one of the guides). I finally beat Mende at wrestling. He really liked to wrestle…especially with me…

We (The two belgians Marika and Tine, our guide Khuu and I) began our three day trek around the eight lakes. We staggered up a never ending forest, through foot-high snow and mud with all our worldly possessions for an hour or two until week came to a wide valley. Then on through a boggy marsh surrounded by snow-capped hills. All in all it took us about ten hours to get to the largest of the Eight Lakes ( a series of volcanic lakes in the western part of central Mongolia). We set up camp and lit a fire. I found wolf tracks in the snow near the tents and Khuu told us about the time when she was sixteen and herding the family’s goats on her own and was surrounded by seventeen wolves attacking the herd.