Boy, was it cold at

Boy, was it cold at night! Gers are pretty neat. Our ger had three beds, a table, a couple of stools, and a wood stove for heat. Tending to the fire was fun. I only have a few photos of our trip to the wilderness as my camera batteries died shortly after we got there. Bummer. It was a very pretty place, though. The place we stayed at was a “tourist ger camp”, so it is like a hotel, but with gers. We were the only foreigners there as tourism is down in this region due to SARS (as we have heard). This is strange, though, because Mongolia has only had 4 confirmed cases of SARS. Oh well. We went horseback riding yesterday. It cost 5000 tugrugs (1 US$ ~~ 1120 tugrugs) per hour. We thought we would only do it for an hour. But, we ended up spending a total of US$35 per person. These Mongolians are clever. First, they gave us a guide which cost us 5000 T (we thought total, but it turned out to be per person!!). The guide took us around, a very nice rice. We went through some Mongolian nomadic villages. We crossed soom streams, took some photos (not me), saw some camels, saw lots of cows and horses and animal shit, and lots of hills and rocks. Very cool. About 2 hours in (!!), we came to a lone ger. Apparently, the guide new the people who lived there, not sure if they were related or not. Well, he signalled that we should get off the horses (he didn’t speak any english). We followed him in the ger. There was another man about his age, a little girl (maybe 10 years old?), and an old man. The young man (he told us his name, but it wasn’t exactly easy to remember like “Bill” would be), made us some traditional Mongolian tea - salty and milky, and gave us some bread. Right away I thought this is going to cost us…. We sat around, drank some tea.. sat… and sat… eventually, the young man took out some traditional Mongolian clothing and signaled that we should dress up and take some photos boy, is this going to cost us!!. I also thought this is going to put us into 3 hours of time….. Well, after that, sure enough, our guide spoke what little english he knew and said that we each should pay 10,000 T to the young man. (a little less than US$10). Grrr. Oh well, we got some good photos of it. It was good tea and bread. We eventually got back on the horses and traveled back to our hotel/ger. The wife of the guide spoke a little more english and told us it cost a total of 60,000 T. Well, we thought that they charge us for 3 hours, plus the guide. uh uhhh.. that was 4 hours. The guide followed us back to our ger with our bags, and asked that we pay him 5000 each. We did. Oh, we didn’t exactly have 60,000 T amongst the three of us, and of course they took US dollars. So, they made some good money off us. I suppose the could use it, though. It was fun. And now, we are back in Ulaan Baatar. We fly to Beijing tomorrow morning. Today, we will check out another museum (the Natural History Museum, lots of dinosaurs).