Oh yes....last time we chatted I was just back from the Gobi desert and we were hanging in UB (Ulaan Bataar) for a couple days, and here for Nadaam! The Nadaam festival is the national festival of Mongolia, all 9 provinces compete in it. The opening ceremonies were amazing, reminded me a lot of the Olympic ones. They had a speech from the president, the presentation of the flags from the provinces, then the athletes came out for Archery, Wrestling, and knuckle-bone shooting. The only other sport in the games is horse racing, and they were showing it on a big screen behind the ceremonies. Lots of pomp and circumstance, I got some great videos of the music and horse riding tricks.
Then we stayed to watch the wrestling. It's just 2 guys, standing up, and then they kind of clench and try to get each other off their feet. Interestingly, the higher ranked wrestlers pick their opponents, so for the first few rounds there are a lot of mismatches. The archery is very good, really nice archers uniforms, and they are shooting (75m for men, 60m for women) at targets on the ground. There are several judges down at the targets and when the hit, they sing! I got a great video of a bullseye :) The knuckle bone shooting is a recent addition to the games, and they really flick bones at some stones, it's kinda odd.
After Nadaam, then next day we went to a budhist monestary, which was cool, we saw monks chanting! Then we headed to the national park, and it was absolutely beautiful. Saw a lot of great rock formations. We did go to another ger family, which was awesome, they dressed up for us and seemed like they really wanted to share their home and traditions with us, which was awesome. Unfortunately, we only got about an hour to go hiking around, and I would have liked about 7. Not enough free time on this tour....so we got up this morning, did some more hiking with Evan and John, up some rocks and watched the group mingle for about 1/2 hour, it was pretty cool. We could almost even here them from about 500 feet up and aways away!
As for the tour, I think everyone is getting a little tired. It's been go-go-go and not everyone is 30 years old. Lot's of complaining starting about people being late to the bus and lingering to long...I, for one, will not miss that part. We have a good group here but there are a couple of odd ducks. Also we don't have enough free time to do what we want, so sometimes you have to skip stuff to do what you want, but those are the choices of a group tour. However, overall it's been pretty good and I've seen some amazing things. Tonight we are going to another monastery that we have a private tour of and dinner after that.
Oh, and we've found that the Chingiss Vodka is quite lovely....
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