Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

I’ve posted a gallery of pictures from my recent trek through Mongolia. You can click here to see it or look at the list of galleries on the Photo Galleries page. I’ve also posted a short video of our guides singing a Kazakh folk song on our last night camping – click here to see […]

When I went to Mongolia in 2008, one of my memories was that I felt a bit sore after some of the longer days in the saddle. The saddles are supplied by the local Kazakh guides and are called “Russian cavalry” saddles. They are basically a steel and wood frame with a leather cushion on […]

When we’re at camp, things are pretty relaxed. Once you get your tent set up, you can go hiking or for a ride if there’s time. One site is my favorite for simply walking upriver past several streams so you can look down an intersecting valley. Our group of camels posed nicely along the way […]

Although there were a few camp sites where we stayed more than one night, life on the trail typically began in the morning with packing up and moving on. We used camels for carrying our gear – about 7 or 8 of them. After getting your own gear packed up, you’d hand it over to […]

We spent the first two days of our time in the park getting used to our horses and meeting the local Kazakhs who would be our horse and camel wranglers. They all lived in the area – one family’s group of gers was a short distance behind our site at the bottom of the mountain: […]

Now that I’ve been home a week and I’m getting back into some routine, I have some time to write a few posts about the trip. After about 30 hours of flying, I finally got into Ulaan Baatar and a solid night’s sleep in the hotel. We spent the next day or two there exploring […]

It’s taken longer than I would have liked but I have just uploaded picture galleries from our trip to Mongolia. You can click here to see pictures from Ulaan Baatar, here to see pictures from western Mongolia (Ulgii and Tavan Bogd), and here for pictures from the Gobi Desert. As usual, the Photo Galleries page […]

Now that our trek is over and I’ve hugged Opie goodbye, I’ll share with you some of the nicknames I gave him at various points on the trip: You Stupid Horse Farty McSmellerton Poopy McFartington Valiant Steed Good Boy Bad Boy Eating Machine Best. Horse. Ever. BTW, Dave changed horses for the last three days […]

Today is the last day of the trek and tonight we’re back in the ger camp in Ulgii. I brought a GPS data logger with me on this trip. It’s not a full GPS device with screen, etc. The idea is that by minimizing all the extras (it’s just a GPS chip and some memory), […]

Here is the view from our last camp, near the Base Camp for Tavan Bogd Peaks (about 10,000 feet): Tavan = 5; Bogd = spiritual leader/saint.  There are 5 peaks surrounded by glaciers.  The back side of the mountains are on the Chinese and Russian borders. – Meredith