Day 19, to Vulture Camp  137km , 1655km to date,  1233m up, 1228m end

Well, another entertaining night, June 1st is a special day in Mongolia, called Mothers and Children day (loosely translated) - lots of kids dressed in their finest also a time for parties - when they party here that means all night, the party breaks up at sunrise.  As we were camped on the bank of a river, this is a popular spot for parties.  Yes, it went all night!  There was pretty well continuous women singing - commonly a chorus, they sounded like a cross between Chinese female singers and Inuit throat singers - it was absolutely

wonderful other than I desperately needed to get to sleep.  It was a normal party with lots of loud voices, many gales a laughter, but the impressive thing was that it was continuously happy, I never heard anything that would suggest anger or escalating voices leading to fisticuffs.

Two nights of minimal sleep made for a hard ride today.

In the pictures of the open range land, you’ll notice there are no fences, yes fences around a compound near a Gur, but not elsewhere.  My understanding is that all open land is the equivalent of our Crown land, open for anyone to use.  I expect there are areas that effectively belong to a family, but only by tradition, not via a tenure system.  (please correct me if someone knows different.)

Well tonight is also interesting…  Big thunder and lightning storm with some strong wind gusts and a period of heavy rain.  So far all is happy within my little tent world.

In case any of you care, this will be 6 camping nights in row, with no access to a shower and the only river/stream looked very questionable, particularly with all the livestock around.  So cleaning oneself involves 4 or 5 baby wipes.  Yes, a shower is highly preferred to 4 baby wipes!

Tomorrow a relatively short 82km, into Munrun and a rest day.  I really need the rest day.

Some pics from the day: