Ellen Shapiro

To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII. The Eagle Hunter doesn't hunt eagles. Rather, Eagle Hunter (the definite article quickly fell away as "Eagle Hunter" became a proper name of sorts) is a Kazakh fellow who has captured a wild eagle and trained it to hunt for him. The basic exchange is that the eagle is rewarded with fresh meat from the kill and both partners are (relatively) happy. Eagle Hunter and his eagle are alleged to share a meaningful "friendship" and, after approximately ten years, the eagle is re-released into the wild to live out its remaining days. No I don't know how long an eagle lives. The focus of this second week in Mongolia was to meet Eagle Hunter and see his eagle. Mongolia has no Empire State Building, Broadway, or New York Yankees. Instead, it has Eagle Hunter and a handful of his eagle-hunting colleagues. This is the holy grail for visitors to Mongolia. Eagle Hunter is, as we say in the neighborhood, the shit. There is even a Superbowl, a World Series, an Olympic Games of eagle hunting held every October (or November -- it's hard to get a straight answer about anything in Mongolia), wherein the hunters and their eagles are rated (no French judge here) on their capabilities as companions in hunting. But this was August -- we were not there for the games, but rather to spend time one-on-one with Eagle Hunter. To observe this unusual and rare phenomenon, you must travel to the western part of Mongolia (which is no walk in the park) and, once there, you have to actually find Eagle Hunter who is, after all, a nomad. It's not like he has a street address; or even a town that he lives in; and certainly he doesn't have a phone. I awoke the morning after the horsemeat-and-horse-blood-tea treatment feeling, I kid you not, a heck of a lot better. By the time my chains of bondage were broken -- okay, by the time adorable little Jan-the-cook unlocked the door of the flat -- I had showered and made myself a cup of tea (damn, I was loving this little apartment) and I was ready to face the world, or at least go out the door. Could it be that the "Mongolian treatment" had caused this improvement in my health? Simply not possible; or was it? At the very least I could not dispute that my cough was improved -- correlation, if not causation, was solidly established. I gave it the benefit of the doubt: nothing like horsemeat and horse-blood tea to relieve a girl's phlegmatic condition. We set out a mere couple of hours after our planned departure time. The jeep driver (different car and driver from the day before) and I occupied the two front seats and Jan, Aiyka, and the translator/guide filled the three back seats. We headed into the "countryside" of western Mongolia. I was dismayed to learn that all of the Mongolian I had cut my teeth on would now be useless. The people in this region were Kazakh and, it turned out, most of them would stare at me blankly if I addressed them in Mongolian. Then again, people who spoke Mongolian stared at me blankly as well, but at least I had grown accustomed to the dim recognition that I was attempting to speak a language they might know. Not so with the Kazakhs -- I would have to learn a new vocabulary of Kazakh words if I wanted to communicate the basics: hello, thank you, goodbye, beautiful, delicious (no need to ask about bathrooms or toilets -- there weren't any), etc. I did, however, find it a heck of a lot easier to pronounce the Kazakh words than the Mongolian words. The sounds were at least somewhat familiar, with a lot of guttural "ch" sounds like in Hebrew. Modern Mongolian, on the other hand, sounds like no language I've ever heard, with the possible exception of a made-up language from an old television variety show -- you can't even figure out where the words begin and end. The plan for that day, as determined the previous night by Aiyka and the translator/guide (once I had reminded them of the need for a plan), was as follows: Drive in the jeep 120km to village Bayan Nuur By Lake (turns out this village is only Bayan Nuur summer village; Bayan Nuur "the real village," I found out four days later, was elsewhere and deserted during the summer on account of the Bayan Nuur summer village where, with gers in tow, everyone relocates for the summer); stop at "the lake" (no one knew the name of the lake -- neither my translator/guide nor the people living around it; it was just "the lake"); cook lunch; and walk around "the lake" (Jan would cook with Aiyka, I would walk to the lake with said translator/guide). This was all to unfold by 1pm. The 3pm-'til-dinner slot was to be our time to meet Eagle Hunter, check out his eagle or eagles (at that time, I had no idea which), and take photos. Finally, we were to sleep in a ger built for us by Aiyka's brother. To say there was slippage in the schedule would be an understatement tantamount to calling Eagle Hunter "a guy with a bird." You've seen the photos of the "roads" in Mongolia so you probably have some sense of the speeds at which we could travel. But to break it down, 120km (that's 74.4 miles to me) at 30km/h equals 4 hours assuming no stops, mishaps, or anything. For this drive, 2 hours had been allocated. And you will recall that we began the day with a 2-hour deficit. Perhaps you're starting to get an idea of how scheduling works in Mongolia. En route to Bayan Nuur By Lake Summer Village we stopped at a ger to "experience Kazakh hospitality." That's what it said on the itinerary, and that's what they said in the jeep -- they had their stories straight and coordinated on this one. These Kazakhs, however, didn't seem all that hospitable. Unless of course you count letting us live as part of the definition of hospitality. Not that I could actually figure out what was going on. Despite having a dedicated entourage of translator/guide, wife-of-guide-company-owner, cook, and driver, nobody told me much. But as far as I could tell we weren't well received at the first ger. Here's what I saw: I was told we were stopping at a ger to "experience Kazakh hospitality." As our jeep approached the ger, the residents, unaccustomed to getting much vehicular traffic, emerged. There was much discussion and gesticulation between our team and theirs. We drove away, quickly and without comment. That's what I know. Things went better at the next ger. We approached. There was discussion. Our driver got out of the jeep. He didn't unzip his fly (this would be the most likely reason for him to get out of the jeep) and he didn't start cleaning the jeep obsessively (the other main reason he might get out: jeep drivers in Mongolia are very serious about cleaning their jeeps; you should have seen our other driver at the gas station -- the one we slept at not the one with the car wash -- the morning after we got stuck in the lake). Therefore, it seemed, we were going inside. My group opened the back door of the jeep (only one door seemed to open in the back; similarly, in our previous jeep, the one in the Gobi, only one of the little back triangular windows would open -- I wonder if it's some kind of Russian manufacturing requirement) so I followed suit. This group of people -- though tentative at first -- was, by the end of the visit, like my long lost family. We did indeed, as advertised, "experience Kazakh hospitality." Big time. And I'm not even talking about the two bottles of vodka we all drank together at 2pm when we revisited the same ger on our way back to Olgii five days later. Granted, I did hand out a shitload of gifts -- this is the Mongolian tradition, observed by both Mongolians and Kazakhs, i.e., the nomadic peoples -- but not until I had decided that I loved these people. When you receive hospitality from people in their ger, you reciprocate by giving some gifts, and we had been offered milk tea, a variety of cheeses, fried dough (little rectangular pieces), and airag, so I was delighted to observe the gift-giving tradition. Each person in the ger received a gift, and I later found out (yes, this was sort of a pattern) that not everyone in the ger was actually a resident of said ger. It turned out that the man who had initially welcomed us to the ger was actually a neighbor and the father of the ger wasn't home. They invited us to stop back to visit on our return to Olgii so that they could kill and cook an entire sheep in my honor, following which we would spend the night in their ger. How can you say no to that? When we left, we took one of the daughters of the ger with us. Not to give you the wrong idea, she was hitching a ride -- she wasn't a gift or anything like that. At least, I think she was a daughter or resident of the ger, but on this I wouldn't bet the family herd. Whatever her status, she needed ride to her cousins' ger which was located, we were told, "Somewhere between Bayan Nuur By The Lake Summer Village and Eagle Hunter." She squeezed in back with the other three, bringing the back-seat population to four. We arrived at the lake at about 2pm. After being welcomed into the ger of Aiyka's friends (where Aiyka and Jan would cook our lunch), and after having our requisite bowl of milk tea, the translator/guide and I embarked upon the scheduled walk to the lake. After a couple of hours, we returned to the ger, where we sat making conversation until lunch was ready about 30 minutes later. Actually, I sat on the wool felt guest-rug with a stupid grin plastered on my face while everyone else sat around talking. We all partook of the day's mutton dish, which was a cross between stew and soup with the requisite hunks of meat and fat and ramen noodles mixed in, followed by milk tea with yogurt skin added to taste. We piled back into the jeep. It was time to find Eagle Hunter. But there was still the matter of our passenger, who needed to be delivered to her cousins' ger. We drove a ways until we found a cluster of three or four gers. The girl directed our driver to ascertain if one of these was indeed her cousins' ger. It was. Not bad, we had found a specific ger in the middle of Mongolia on the first try. We bade her farewell but she gestured for us to wait. She disappeared inside one of the gers and returned with two cucumbers and tomatoes, and a recycled plastic water-bottle full of yogurt. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me, part of the lunchtime discussion had revolved around my proclivity for vegetables and yogurt. This was an astonishingly generous gift. Not especially the yogurt -- that's a plentiful item during summer. But tomatoes and cucumbers in western Mongolia -- these don't come easy. We had been given the Mongolian equivalents of truffles and caviar. Time check: departure from the cousins' ger, 6pm. Yes we're still talking about the events of a single day. In August it stays light in western Mongolia until 9:30 or 10pm, so I was able to continue to take in the scenery as we progressed toward Eagle Hunter's ger, wherever that might be. As we got closer (I hoped) we stopped a number of times to inquire at other gers where we might find Eagle Hunter, and also to ascertain which roads went to which destinations. Eventually, as we drove closer to the river, we found someone who was able not only to direct us to Eagle Hunter's ger but also to tell us which roads would be most promising. At least, this was my interpretation of events. Again, I don't speak Kazakh and my translator/guide rarely translated, so I'm just speaking impressionistically here. I did observe a grouping of three gers near a collection of sizeable old trees across the river and its tributaries. We barreled down a hill and, after crossing the first tributary, we swerved across the riverbed and changed to an alternate route about 15km downstream. Crossing the second tributary was a piece of cake and as my spirits rose we bumped down the steep riverbank over large boulders to the main crossing. Our driver paused a few meters from the river bank and steeled himself for the crossing. Aiyka, though she does not drive, has traveled in the countryside for years and had advised him on the best route for our crossing -- and he listened. As our driver feathered the clutch, I took a deep breath and clutched whatever handholds I could find. He hit the gas and we splashed into the river. We slowed, we pulled free, we slowed again, we pulled free again -- it was a laugh a minute I tell you. But despite several moments of concern, we were never far from dry ground, we were on a rocky riverbed (better for traction than clay mud), and I liked everyone who might be trapped inside the jeep with me. And Eagle Hunter's ger was within view (though at the time, I wasn't sure about this) and surely a guy who hunts with an eagle can figure out how to get a jeep unstuck from a river. It's indeed amazing how many thoughts can flash through one's mind in the blink of an eye. It couldn't have taken more than 90 seconds to cross that rushing river and those are only the most select thoughts that clicked through my brain during the crossing (the rest would be inappropriate for your ears, gentle reader). We hit dry ground and I let out a whoop and a cheer. Did I do that out loud? Yes, I guess I did, because everyone thought this was terribly funny and they all joined in. Our driver's grin was likely visible as far away as Eagle Hunter's ger. We pulled around to the front of the center ger in the cluster and I cracked open my door. I didn't know if we were asking directions again or if we were actually at Eagle Hunter's ger, but I was going to stretch my legs no matter what. Then, all of the women in the back piled out through the one working Russian jeep-door, so I began to be hopeful that perhaps we had actually arrived and that I might soon have the pleasure and honor of meeting Eagle Hunter. Our bags and countless boxes were unloaded from the jeep. Huh? That wasn't part of the game plan, even if this did turn out to be Eagle Hunter's ger. We were supposed to stay at the ger that Aiyka's brother had built for us. We had actually stopped there to inspect it on the way. Because it was very windy, I was told -- and I'm not sure if it was windy when he built it, or windy in that spot, or if he was simply concerned about the wind -- he had not done the most impressive job with our ger (I was getting to be a pretty good judge of gers by now). On account of our previous week's assorted fiascos (more of which had by now been relayed to Aiyka by our translator/guide during our drive from Olgii), Aiyka insisted that I come and inspect the custom-built ger for approval. Sure, it looks fine. Thumbs up. Whatever. But now they were bringing the entire contents of the jeep into Eagle Hunter's ger. There seemed to be no purpose in inquiring about this apparent change of plans; at this point I'd have been surprised only by a lack of changes in plan. I was totally in the Mongolian swing of things, operating on pure instinct. Inside the ger I was ushered to a stool -- the seat of honor -- and, as always, we all entered and walked to the left of the stove and sat down at the back of the ger facing the stove (and the door). There were a number of children and other young people around, ranging in age from about 3 to 20. There was an old woman in charge (she turned out only to be in her early 40s but all the people in Mongolia look older than their years due to the harsh nomadic lifestyle and the unforgiving elements: strong winds, hot and dry summers, bitterly cold winters) and she immediately began bustling about with bowls for tea while one of the daughters worked on the fire and another went to haul more water from the river. There was, as far as I could tell, no Eagle Hunter presently in the ger. We sat around for a couple of hours drinking tea and talking, with me as usual not understanding a word. I repeatedly had to fend off entreaties to eat this or that. I did eat some white cheese, a bowl of yogurt supplemented with sheep fur (or maybe it was goat fur), and some milk tea with yogurt skin, plus I nibbled politely on one of those fried dough squares. Aiyka and Jan had started cooking too. I left the ger to wander around outside. Some boys were jumping on the backs of horses, bareback and barefoot, and racing around as quickly as the horses would run. At one point, one of the little boys (approximately 7 years old) tumbled off onto the hard, boulder-strewn ground as the horse charged back toward the ger. I sucked my breath in, but apparently this was no big deal to anybody else (I can only imagine the reactions if something like this happened in Westchester -- or Long Island). Some of the older children walked over to him and helped him up and he was back on his horse in no time. There were also dozens of sheep and goats milling about, some lambs, and four or five horses -- all of which seemed to belong to this ger, not the other two gers, which had their own herds as well. As soon as we finished our dinner (yes, mutton), the beds were prepared. The four of us women would sleep in a row on the floor of the ger, in the same location as we had been sitting moments before, with the addition of "Kazakh mattresses": two felt wool carpets that were laid down one on top of the other. I continued to wonder if Eagle Hunter was in fact going to show up at the ger. It was approaching 11:30pm; no Eagle Hunter in evidence. As you may recall, we had been scheduled to see him beginning at 3pm. I finally inquired and my translator/guide finally filled me in: "Oh, Eagle Hunter is at his winter home cutting hay for his herd for the winter. He'll be back tomorrow." Got the schedule now? To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII.

Varmint, do you have something in your throat?

The digital body I use is a Canon D60 SLR, which is part of the EOS system -- meaning it can take any Canon EOS lens from the film-camera series. I also schlep a lot of additional equipment -- half of what I carry on a trip can be camera stuff -- such as lenses (for deep in-country travel I rely mainly on the workhorse EF 50 mm F1.4 USM lens, and a 100-300/F4.5-5.6 EF USM Zoom for longer shots), strobes (two Canon 550EX Speedlites plus the ST E2 Wireless Controller), filters (circular polarizing, etc.), sometimes a tripod or monopod, cable release, lens-cleaning stuff, memory cards (on a 6 megapixel camera you need a few 1GB CF cards if you want to take 1000+ photos), high-capacity batteries (I definitely need to get one more of these; I wound up using a lot more juice than I thought I would, because everybody I photographed wanted to look at the photos on the camera's digital screen and that's a major drain on power -- I was fearful I'd run out towards the end of the trip but I made it home with 1/4 of my last battery remaining), film cameras as backup (this was a short trip so I only took one of my smaller Yashica T4 cameras, but on a longer trip I might take my Leica film SLR as well because, well, even if you find yourself in the middle of a war a Leica is still going to work just fine), film and batteries for those backup cameras, sometimes a few disposable cameras to give to people so they can take photos for me when I'm absent, and a special padded camera backpack to hold it all. Although, having looked over that somewhat daunting equipment list, I should emphasize that 90% of the shots one gets can usually be had with just the camera-body and a lens, and all that other stuff really just buys you 10% additional capability (an important 10% if you sell and exhibit photos, but not meaningful if you're shooting for personal use). And of course no matter how much gear you carry, you'll always bump into someone who's carrying twice as much!

Suzanne, I don't tell Steven any of the really gory details until I get home. If I did, I think you'd find me handcuffed to the bed with only my right hand free to type posts on eGullet. I've been traveling alone on a shoestring to far-away places since I was 22 (when I traveled around the world by myself on my hard-earned babysitting money) so I've gotten pretty good at troubleshooting and looking after myself and others. I've found that while it's very tempting to report home (if there is even a way to do so) to family about the trials and tribulations I've encountered on my travels (in order to be comforted by the empathy of loved ones), I know that it’s also unfair because of the worry it will cause them in the long run (no way to contact me for weeks on end to follow up even if they want to). Generally speaking, there are always times of stress and even trouble on trips to far-away and off-the-beaten-track destinations, but heck, I wouldn’t have these entertaining stories to tell you if I didn’t go, would I?

Awilda, A tour company, no. I have taken groups as large as 12 to Nepal, I co-lead a Sierra Club trip along Oregon's Rogue River most years, and I'm often willing to put trips together for groups of people. But it's not my business and I don't make any money from it. To date, I've never even covered my own expenses. My profession is that I'm a writer and photographer, not a guide or travel agent. But when I get really far off the beaten path and I tell people about my travels I often get requests to put trips together--which I sometimes will do. When I'm really passionate about a place (like Nepal) I'm eager to share it with people and whatever I can do to get people to travel outside the mainstream, I do.

Hell, I'd settle for a book deal! But we already know that there's no justice in this world. And I haven't even told you about the Eagle Hunter yet! That'll be in the next installment.

Rachel, The big expense, when you go to a developing nation halfway around the world, is getting there. Plane tickets are so variable in price, and so much depends on luck and when you buy them, or get them with frequent flier miles, not to mention how you combine them with other stops (for example I also spent a week in Beijing on the same trip), that my actual trip cost wouldn't be indicative of much. Once you get to a developing nation halfway around the world, however, things get cheap -- and if you want them to be cheaper than cheap, that can also be arranged. Of course you can also spend just as much as you'd spend on a vacation at Canyon Ranch, if you go with an upscale tour agency like Butterfield & Robinson. Not that B&R goes to Mongolia, but they'll get you for $500 per day in Southeast Asia when you can travel there on your own for like a dollar, and a lot of that money will go to Western companies and to middlemen, whereas I prefer to work directly with locals and limit the layers in the hierarchy of payment -- it's best for everybody, and it's the most respectful way to deal with the economics of it all. Certainly, once you're there, for $50-$100 per day you can travel at just about the highest level Mongolia can provide, and certainly you can travel quite well there for less. In terms of conversion, one US dollar is about 1000 Mongolian Tugrik (1084 to be precise, last time I checked). At Ristorante Della Casa-2, a large Pizza Mongol, with mutton and onions, is 2400 Tugrik. That would qualify as very, very expensive by local standards (annual per capita income is in the US$1000 range). Shrondell, I know, I know. It's amusing just to think about the idea of a kosher restaurant in Mongolia, but I'll take the opportunity to point out a couple of things about world travel for those with dietary restrictions: It's definitely true that there's a point of restrictedness (is that a word?) at which it becomes supremely challenging to travel outside of places that really cater to you. But it can always be done if you're willing to form a group. I probably couldn't take one Hasidic Jew to Mongolia on a tour, because at that level of observance that person would be very particular about what knife has touched what product, and what bowl has been used for what, but if a group of 12 wanted to go I'm pretty certain that I could set it up--we'd have our own cook (this is not unusual), vegetarian-only food (they'd have to eat a lot of noodles, and some mayonnaise too!), and other approved arrangements. At a lower level of observance, it becomes even easier in direct proportion to the lessening of restrictions: I can take strictly Conservative and even some Modern Orthodox Jews to Nepal, for example, as part of a mixed group because they tend to be satisfied with "no meat" as a sufficient level of kashruth so I can just tell the cook, "No meat." And, while I don't keep kosher, I did grow up in a kosher home, know the dietary laws, and still observe some of the practices of kashruth. And this has never been a problem for me traveling anywhere in the world--except maybe North Carolina. [edited for clarity]

Jin, I try to "shoot em as I see em" and not alter the photos much at all. I've done the same thing to every one of these photos: I've run the entire set through a batch processing program called DCE Auto Enhance so that the gigantic 6 megapixel images from my digital camera don't blow out your screen--it reduces images to any size, in this case 600x400. It also does a little bit of contrast adjustment and the like so that the photos are properly optimized for computer screens. But I don't do any special effects in PhotoShop or anything like that--because I'm a film photographer at heart. I kind of see the world through my own lens. I know it sounds hokey--sort of like I'm into crystals--but it's just how it is.

>> Many questions answered in Part II here >>

To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII. The escape-fantasies began after I had walked about 10 miles barefoot through slippery mud (yes, it was clay) in an evaporating (not quickly enough for our needs, though) lake in the middle of the Gobi Desert (carrying no drinking-water) in the hopes of convincing a bunch of Mongolians (prospective Mongolians, rather, because they were too far away to determine who they were at first, and who, it turns out, spoke zero English) to walk back with me through the slippery mud "lake" to help extricate our vehicle. As their reward, they would get to walk all the way back to their trucks because we didn't have enough room to transport them. Nor could we transport ourselves -- I had to slog once again to the edge of the "lake" until the jeep hit dry ground before we were able to catch a ride around. (As you may recall, this had been our original, unheeded suggestion seven hours earlier.) When I returned to the jeep with the Mongol horde in tow, J casually suggested: "What would you think about spending next week on the beach somewhere -- maybe Bali or the south of Thailand . . . " Until then, my intractable nature hadn't permitted even the slightest bit of speculation about an escape plan, but the seed was planted and my imagination ran with it: hot showers, beaches, really good Thai food, spa treatments! It was something to think about, at least, as our driver's redoubled efforts to get us past the lake -- an automobile graveyard of sorts -- became increasingly punishing. At the all-time crazy-high of his driving insanity, a jar of pickles (the previous day, psycho-driver had purchased several jars of homemade pickles and, despite my protestations, refused to stow them sensibly) flew into the air, ricocheted off the ceiling, and crashed into J's back, whereupon it shattered, raining glass shards, pickles, and pickle juices all over J (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of us). The next logical step in this madcap progression would, you might expect, involve stopping and attempting to address the issue of the pickles--and more importantly, the glass shards that would soon be embedded in our asses. But our driver, veritably possessed at this point, refused to stop. His latest operating theory was that, if he stopped where he was, he would get stuck, even though we were no longer in the lake and were in no more danger of getting stuck than we would have been on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. May I also remind everybody that this was the same day on which we ran out of gas and had to sleep on the floor of a Mongolian gas station. Like a prisoner of war, it was the fantasy of eventual escape that sustained us. As we drove for 14 hours the next day, nestled among the residue of pickle juices and more than a few stray shards of glass, we watched intently for the lights of UB and, with the remaining vestiges of our sanity, in the back seat, we secretly planned our tropical beach vacation where mutton fur and gristle would be nothing but distant dreams. That night back in UB, our translator/guide, J, and I feasted at Ristorante Della Casa-2. We had planned to dine at Pizza Della Casa, which seems to be synonymous with Ristorante Della Casa-1, but we were thwarted by a surreal quirk of UB's transportation network: nobody in the entire city, and especially not the cab drivers, knows the names of the streets. Any of the streets. Like, if there existed a Main Street in UB, nobody there would know its name, because they navigate nomad-style, strictly by landmarks and perhaps the constellations. I would like to pause at this time to assure you that everything I'm telling you is the truth. Luckily, in the process of searching for Pizza Della Casa aka Ristorante Della Casa-1, we stumbled across the Ristorante Della Casa-2 outpost. Were I to tell you that our translator/guide ordered a pizza, and were I to offer you a prize -- say, a piece of "old cheese," if you guessed correctly -- do you think you might be able to guess what kind of topping she had on her pizza? All pretense of wanting to enjoy authentic Mongolian cuisine had been thrashed out of us somewhere in the desert, and at this point there was no hesitation about ordering Western food. Not that we could actually get any Western food, but even an approximation of bad Western food sounded dreamy to us. Even the copious mayonnaise (perhaps it's yogurt, I lied to myself) on J's salad didn't stop me from eating almost all of it. We were due to depart early the next morning on a flight to Olgii, the capital of the aimag (province) in the western part of Mongolia, where the population is predominantly Kazakh. Over dinner we told our translator/guide that we weren't going. J's symptoms had been worsening and she was barely able to fight gravity enough to stand up. And my upper respiratory situation was no picnic either -- J and I sounded like the entire population of a sanitarium as depicted in early 20th Century German literature. Our translator/guide called back to Olgii, the seat of power, where the owner of the guide company and his wife live, to inform them of our decision. This threw the wife (the owner was out "in the countryside" with a group of 14 Swedes) into a kerfuffle. So distressed was she that we weren't coming, she begged (via the translator/guide) us to reconsider. She would personally arrange everything for us, she would care for us, she would take extra good care of J, everything would be seamless, she promised. We declined the offer. I was due to spend the following day with our translator/guide visiting UB's greatest-hits attractions. J could barely extract herself from bed, but I made her agree to join me at the hotel's buffet breakfast (included in the cost of the room). As we prepared to head off to breakfast, it became clear that J's traveler's checks were missing. All of them. No, there is no American Express office in Mongolia. There is, however, a place that American Express has designated as its authorized backup-subcontractor-assistant-agent. Not that this office was authorized to actually issue replacement travelers checks, but J was asked to fill out an opus of documents, forms, and paperwork (which we did tag-team, swapping her paperwork back and forth) in the hopes that she could get replacements by the end of one week -- one day before we would depart the country forever (this was the optimistic scenario). The woman who helped us was, however, extremely nice. We began the search for medication. By the way, if you need to make a phone call in UB, there are no pay-phones per se. There are, instead, guys wandering around with phones. Not exactly the cellular phones we're accustomed to. They're like regular desk phones, but totally wireless. At first we speculated that maybe all these guys were wandering telephone-equipment salespeople, but we figured it out after awhile. Eventually we located a pharmacy, and after scrutinizing several shelves full of Mongolian medicines, some thankfully with a few English words on their labels, we were able to find something that we were pretty darn sure was an antibiotic, and possibly even one intended for human consumption (one might think that this, of all situations, would have been an ideal opportunity to make use of the fact that our guide was really a translator by training, but alas she was apparently not trained in this particular area of vocabulary). The medicine was in the form of a liquid suspension, which added an eerie aura of Middle Ages-style alchemy to the whole experience. Little did we know that the woman only sold J enough for two days, but at least it was something. We were so buoyed by our triumphs that day -- to be clear, I am referring to the events described in the three preceding paragraphs, which at the time felt like triumphs -- that J and I cast aside our weak-willed fantasizing and shallow dreams of spa treatments and tropical cocktails served in hollowed-out pineapples with paper umbrellas. We were going to press on to the western part of Mongolia and see some damn Kazakhs if it was the last thing we did. We made arrangements to depart the following morning, and the guide company's owner's wife was ecstatic. She and our translator/guide scrambled to get us new plane tickets and fortune was shining down upon us because we were actually ticketed to fly into Olgii and not into Khovd (hundreds of kilometers away) as had been our original plan on account of lack of Olgii availability. But the following morning, J was too sick to go. The antibiotics hadn't kicked in, she was miserable, and it was clear that if she subjected herself to the strain of additional travel she would only get worse. This time around we skipped right over the Thai beach fantasy and started talking about maybe Los Angeles as a nice place to spend a few days. This is known as hitting rock bottom. We also discussed putting off our departure to the west for another day in hopes of an improvement in her health, me going alone and her staying in the hotel recuperating, or just moving on to Beijing and spending the week there (we had plans to spend a little time in Beijing at the end of the trip anyway). J was insistent that I go ahead west and leave her to recuperate in the hotel. "What are you going to do, sit in the hotel room and watch me sleep?" But how could I leave her at that point? We still weren't even sure the stuff she was taking was an antibiotic. What if she got worse and was all alone? Not to mention, though I've always had an interest in Mongolia, I'm not the one who actually provided the final push to get us there. This was her dream more than mine. It was simply not an option to separate from her for even a day without first getting her medically stabilized. We continued the now-repetitive discussion at the buffet breakfast (included in the cost of the room). We tried to find the address of an American doctor in UB but apparently there aren't any. We tried to find the address of any Western doctor. Nothing doing on that front either. Then we got the bright idea that, since there were a bunch of US Marines staying in the hotel (I hope I haven't compromised our national security by mentioning that there are US Marines on assignment in UB, but I would like to go on record as the first journalist to break the story), maybe they would be traveling with a doctor. No dice. Their unit's medic wasn't slated to arrive until September 5th. We'd be long gone by then. I was back to fantasizing: I imagined standing up in the middle of the cavernous dining room, which was after all full of Westerners, expats, and various high-ranking officials (this was an ultra-luxury hotel by Mongolian standards), and shouting out, as in the movies, "Is there a doctor in the house!" Less dramatically, I resolved to ask everybody in the room individually. I surveyed the room, looking for candidates. I saw a Western woman, probably in her 50s, sitting with a teenage boy who I took to be her son. I got up from our table, forced myself to march across the dining room (yes, I am a life-long shy person), and asked, "Do you speak English?" "Yes," she replied pleasantly. "Do you happen to know of an American or Western doctor in UB?" I continued. "My friend is quite ill and we've been told by the embassy that there are no American or Western doctors here." "Why yes," she said. "Actually, we're traveling with a physician from the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. Let's go see him right now." Turns out there was a group of Boy Scouts from LA doing some kind of service work in Mongolia. The doctor they had with them turned out to be a preeminent pediatrician, and he immediately gave Jennifer a thorough exam -- not to mention his mere presence was tremendously confidence-inspiring and comforting. After listening to her breathing and coughing, and checking down her throat, in her nose, chest, etc., he announced that she didn't have pneumonia, but she did have a bad case of bronchitis. And then the young man who had been sitting with the lovely woman at breakfast (he was, it turned out, not her son) produced from his bag a "Z-pack" (a course of Zithromax, the mother of all antibiotics for upper respiratory infections). And, as luck would have it, the doctor would be remaining in the hotel for the next few days and could be called upon to monitor J's progress. Things were looking up. J shoo shoo-ed me away and told me to get on my way to the west before it was too late. So it turns out that I would head out to the western part of the country in search of Kazakhs, while J would sleep off the bronchitis and recuperate in peace and quiet. I sat alone on the flight to Olgii. I was so exhausted from all the stress and troubleshooting, and the worrying. I zoned out and watched the barren landscape far below. (Those aren't actually photos taken from the plane -- they're taken from ground level -- but this was a good place to put them.) Olgii is the quintessential western town. Western Mongolia, that is. I arrived on Saturday, which is the day on which everything is closed, and Olgii looked like a ghost town. It was extremely dry and dusty and there was no one in the streets. All that was missing was the tumbleweeds. The guide company's owner's wife greeted me at the airport with her adorable nine-year old son, a well-loved Land Cruiser, and a driver. My translator/guide, also from Olgii, was greeted by her husband. Can you envision the tumbleweeds? I was whisked away to a special apartment for guests (apparently used for their small groups, as there was only one bedroom -- and I certainly qualified as a small group), where I would be able to stay alone (oh happy day!) for the night. After I was safely ensconced in the apartment, my translator/guide took her leave and Aiyka (the guide company's owner's wife) and Jan (the most adorable Mongolian cook I've ever seen, and I've seen a few) set about making us dinner in the apartment's kitchen while I washed the long trip off of me (with gloriously hot water) and down the drain. I have little memory of what we ate for dinner that night, but it was light and involved soup and home-baked (by Aiyka's daughter) bread with preserves from Russia, and margarine. Margarine? I never quite figured that out but, in the middle of this dairy-intensive nation, it is quite common to see margarine. I suppose the lack of refrigeration has something to do with it, but at the same time the Mongolians regularly eat unrefrigerated yogurt, cheese, and, yes, butter. Go figure. The meal was accompanied, as always, by bottomless bowls of milk tea. And then Aiyka heard my cough. (Remember, although J was acutely ill, I was far from being the poster girl for good bronchial health.) "Would you like me to treat you?" she inquired. "Oh, you have medicine?" I asked, hopeful. "No! Mongolian treatment!" she beamed. Okay, time to put the kiddies to bed. This is where the story goes NC-17. The moment I indicated my assent, Aiyka and Jan, who at that point I knew only as long as you have, descended upon me and briskly removed my shirt and started unfastening my bra. I was too dumbfounded to resist or question them. Whatever they were going to do, I hoped it wouldn't hurt. They wrapped me in quilts from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes. They submerged my feet in a plastic basin (also used for washing clothes) of hot water with a red powdered substance mixed in. I was told it was "a spice that Russians use a lot," I guessed paprika, and research by J later indicated cayenne pepper. Jan then brought over a saucepan filled with a dark liquid and hunks of something suspended in it. Whatever it was had been cooked, and it was hot. The solid contents of this brew were removed one piece at a time (I couldn't really see all that well what was going on because the two of them were buzzing around me and the quilts, while now opened to reveal my body, still somewhat obscured my view). They placed a piece of this stuff on my back and patted it flat onto my right kidney. The left followed. I was then wrapped up in sheets of plastic, Yentl style, so tightly I could scarcely breathe. With what little breath I could draw, I asked, "What is that?" I don't know why I hadn't guessed earlier: "Horsemeat!" I was repackaged in the quilts; not even my eyes peeked out. A hand broke through the quilt nearest my face and gestured for me to accept a drink. "Drink!" (Jan had virtually no English -- about as much as I had Mongolian -- and Aiyka was shy about speaking, even though her English turned out to be rather good). It was hot, very hot, so I blew on it for a while and it steamed my face. That alone was surprisingly comforting. Then I sipped and almost gagged. I couldn't identify the taste but to me, in my little cave world, I could have sworn that it tasted like blood. "Could it be horse-blood tea? Nah. But why not?" went the internal dialog. After all, I was already wrapped up in plastic sheets with horsemeat plastered to my back. Would horse-blood tea really come as a surprise? I managed about three sips, maybe four, and decided that it would be best not to ask for details about the tea. Denial and ignorance were my allies. The hand popped in front of my face again and the horse-blood tea (that's what I decided to call it) was withdrawn. "You didn't drink!" "Uh, it was very hot." "Not hot anymore! Drink this!" A new cup was thrust at me and I cautiously blew on this one. I hazarded a sip and it seemed slightly less offensive than the previous brew. I managed to get down a couple of additional sips. That cup was removed and a third steaming cup came into my cave-world. This one seemed to be something along the lines of actual tea. I blew on it, steamed my face, and drank approximately half of the potion. "Stay in bed for the next hour. Then go to toilet. Can you sleep like this?" "You mean wrapped up [in horsemeat?] like this?" "Okay, we unwrap you. But stay in bed!" Jan and Aiyka set about unwrapping me, and then put me to bed. I removed my pants, which by then had a ring of horse blood around the waistline from the dripping steaks that were pressed against my body. Aiyka whisked my pants away and returned moments later with the evidence washed away. There followed a large amount of gesticulating and what I was able to decipher was that I was to stay in bed wrapped in the heavy quilts, and they were going to lock me into the flat--they wanted me to stay in bed at all costs, even if it meant being locked in. The door was locked from the outside -- not something I was terribly excited about. Jan would come with the keys at 9:00 the following morning to liberate me and cook up some breakfast. What was the point of arguing? If my fate was to be trapped in a building collapse in the capital of the Mongolian Kazakh aimag with horse-blood on my pants, so be it. I was tired and the horse-blood tea had washed away some of the stress and worry of the past week. If there was a natural disaster (and at least a forest fire wasn't a concern, as there were no trees in sight), I doubt I'd have noticed anyway. And at least, in the end, I got my spa treatment. To be continued in Part III . . . To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII A few photos from the meat market in Olgii: Construction workers are the same everywhere: Outdoor snooker redux: To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII.

I don't know what Inner Mongolia looks like but if it looks anything like Mongolia (Outer Mongolia to the Chinese) we can expect to see the expansion of the Gobi Desert into China. As it is, about 15 miles from Beijing there actually is a desert and apparently (according to Lonely Planet Beijing) winds are blowing the sands towards the capital at a rate of just over one mile per year. While Inner Mongolia is not exactly right next door, I fear that grazing cows on grasslands like those in Mongolia would be bad news. But enough about that. Regarding the cheese-making—I promise that there will be more details on that shortly but for the moment I can tell you that no, they don’t make cheese by storing it in stomachs of any kind (eating it doesn’t count, right?).

If you can verify the mayonnaise as being part of the Russian cuisine (I haven't been there and last I checked going to Little Odessa didn't quite qualify for getting my passport stamped), I absolutely agree that this is where the mayo comes from. It certainly didn't come from the Chinese and it had to have come from one border or the other (or, apparently, from California).

Please behave. They get the majority of their imports from Russia and Germany. The ubiquitous mayo is some Russian garbage out of a tube. But we are definitely at the very far end of my expertise. I can also say, though, that there are a lot of Korean and Taiwanese connections with Mongolia. There are restaurants in UB with names like Seoul and the whole "Mongolian barbecue" trend came via Taiwan I think. I'll try to get this Mongolian food professor's e-mail address so we can ask him some of these questions! [Edit: because I remembered about the tube]

Back in 2000, at least I think it was 2000, Fat Guy and I went to Singapore. We had with us an early model digital camera that took impressively weak photographs, so we never really did anything with them. But I was inspired by some recent eGullet traffic about Singapore to go back through my photo archives in search of the Singapore snapshots. Then I dug up some old information on eGullet about Singapore from back in the days when every user had an "X" next to his or her name. So, let me call this thread the Consolidated Singapore Info Thread. It includes some old posts (the original thread containing them has now been removed) and some old photographs, and hopefully the next person to go to Singapore (JACK!!!) will add some newer material. Here's what Fat Guy had to say about Singapore on August 6, 2001: As a follow-up to Fat Guy's post, I posted a recipe for the Singapore Sling (the big drink of Singapore): I also posted this article, which I originally wrote for Concierge.com, on nightlife in Singapore: A couple of other key posts from the old thread: Sng Sling wrote, Fat Guy, Greenhitop, There were several others, I don't mean to sell them short, but I made the cut after that last post for purposes of this digest. Finally, here's my mini photo album of Singapore and Singapore cuisine. I haven't gone through and labeled all the photos because I wanted this up in time for Jack's trip, but if you have any questions ask away and we can develop this thread into a big Singapore guide for all things food. Enjoy . . .

Whaaaa? Hm? Who knows? It's all oral history and everybody has a different story, usually made up on the spot, about how things got to be the way they are. There's no Mongolian Larousse Gastronomique or even Bobby Flay so there's nobody to ask. There's some food professor at the university in UB, but what I read by him (I'll give some quotes in part-the-second) is about as informative as the Visit Mongolia 2003 site that Jon linked to. Maybe they just like mayonnaise?

Jon, this exact verbiage was reiterated in the MIAT (Mongolian Airline) in-flight magazine! I'm planning to provide some very informative excerpts in the second part of this account.

I'm going to give you one guess what was in them! And yes, they're a bit momo-like in appearance (you know our bulldog is named Momo, right?), but then again they're similar to a lot of different types of rustic dumplings you'd find all over Asia. In a lot of cases, the answer to that is, "What showers? What bathrooms?" For much of the latter part of the trip, I used the same bathroom the cattle used, aka the great outdoors. It's not like there's any lack of space! But in the Ger camps and the city, bathrooms were pretty normal -- a mix of Western and Eastern toilets -- and showers were plentiful (though usually lukewarm and sometimes cold).

No but they play billiards outdoors. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's for Part II.

To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII. "You're going where? And what exactly is it that you'll be doing there?" "Is that inner or outer you're going to?" "Do they have Mongolian barbecue there?" "Will you sleep in a yurt?" This was the standard litany directed at me regarding my impending departure for Mongolia, and when you plan a trip to Mongolia your departure impends for a long time -- you don't get there by subway. I didn't have any pat answers to these frequently asked questions, and still don't. I had been interested in the country since I was a young child, the people always seemed exotic and the land so far away, I knew it was the seat of the largest empire the world has ever seen (past or present), the people have lived through the worst of the rise and fall of communism and endured endless hardship and hostile neighbors, and the nomadic lifestyle and the idea of living in a ger (don't use the word yurt; it's the Russian term and is now in extreme disfavor) fascinated me. "Oh, I've always been interested in Mongolia; it seems like a really cool place," is the best I could muster. If there are levels of off-the-beaten-path destinations ranked on a scale of 1-10, Mongolia is surely a 10, or a 9 if you anchor the scale with the moon. On account of a refreshing, and also somewhat terrifying at times, lack of tourism infrastructure, my visit to Mongolia was a comedy of errors -- a very long comedy, kind of like the length of all 171 episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond shown all at once, five times over. There were lots of high points, and there were so many low points I lost count sometime on the first or second day -- so much went wrong so often, it became an issue of keeping track of the greatest hits rather than letting any given incident become too bothersome. Storytelling value was often the light at the end of the tunnel. Cue Lawrence of Arabia music, please. Well, maybe it's not quite the desert in the Ansel Adams photos or the David Lean movies. It's a real desert. Mongolia is not only culturally rich, but the landscape and scenery are truly like nothing I had ever seen before. It certainly doesn't feel like planet Earth: it's a seemingly untouched and never-ending series of vast open spaces with nothing around for miles -- that's nothing as in no people, no buildings, no trees, just occasional patches of desert grass. The sky seems so close to the horizon that it always feels within reach. The sand dunes in the Gobi Desert are a mighty challenge -- none of us reached the top. The roads, if you can call them that, are barely discernible dirt paths running through the expanses -- the only paved roads we traveled were in Ulaan Baatar, the capital city, and along the route to one of the most visited tourist attractions, the Erdene Zu monastery about 200 kilometers outside of the city. In most cases you can follow the tracks of the jeeps that have come before or just as easily pick your own. We were greeted at the airport by our guide, which was the last thing to go completely right for the next couple of weeks. Actually, there had already been mechanical trouble on one leg of the plane flight (no fault of the Mongolians -- this was in Japan) and our guide turned out not to be a guide. She was a translator by training (actually, she was an English teacher at the local middle school but it's Mongolia -- let's not get too technical), not a guide, and though she spoke English she didn't know all that much about our planned destinations. Nor did she know what those destinations were supposed to be. Our first tipoff was that there was an old (really old, like the kind of old you see in Cuba old) Nissan (or was it a Datsun) sedan waiting for us -- hardly the piece of equipment necessary for a week in the Gobi dessert. By the time we arrived at the restaurant where we were to have our orientation meeting thirty minutes later -- the restaurant was bizarrely named "California" -- it became clear to us that somewhere along the way we had fallen through the cracks and our guide was operating from an early draft of our itinerary (one we had rejected and not the actual itinerary we had approved). And this was the serious guide company -- the one personally recommended to us by a National Geographic journalist who had been to Mongolia many times over the past 3 years and had surely covered every inch of ground we were to cover -- and then some. Our translator/guide, on the one hand, had us scheduled to spend 5 days in the aforementioned Erdene Zu monastery and its environs, something that might take an eager tourist one afternoon at most -- unless you have a very specific interest in this particular Buddhist site, spending 5 days there would be like going to Washington, DC, for a week and spending 5 days at the Lincoln Memorial. We, on the other hand, had us scheduled for a week in the Gobi Desert, traveling by jeep. My dear friend and traveling companion -- my friend J, with whom I have in the past spent 2-1/2 weeks in a shared tent in Nepal enduring days of pouring rain and blood-sucking leeches -- was already starting to cough like a whooping crane (does SARS incubate so quickly, we wondered?) and in her eagerness to embrace the country she got us trapped into eating Mongolian food for lunch at the hotel, I mean restaurant, California. Innocently J asked our guide and short-lived driver: "Oh, what are you having for lunch?" We learned very quickly that for 99% of Mongolians the answer to that question will always be mutton. In an instant, all my dreams of culinary diversity (not to mention my hopes that we would encounter unusual Mongolian interpretations of pizzas, pastas, and hamburgers) were cast aside as I was shamed into ordering one of the four Mongolian dishes on the menu. J chose the horhog: fried mutton dumplings -- approximately three times the size of standard Chinese dumplings -- with chunks of mutton, mutton fat, mutton gristle, mutton skin, and maybe a little mutton fur, sealed inside. And, I noticed, she was having difficulty swallowing -- I took that to be a very bad sign. I, on the other hand, ordered the very authentic lamb cooked in a red wine reduction. Well, I actually never saw even so much as a trace of this kind of cuisine out in the countryside, but it was written right there in black and white on the menu, "Mongolian Food," so I ate every bite (except for that which I shared with J). Over the course of lunch we told our translator/guide about the itinerary we were supposed to have. She chatted with the driver in Mongolian and then turned back to us. Clearly we'd have to get another car and driver if we were going to go to the Gobi. And she'd have to call the company's owner's wife and confer with her (the owner was away, guiding a larger group) about these changes. Plus we would have to change our departure date for the western part of Mongolia and that entailed changing plane tickets during the high tourist season. Throughout lunch we gently pressed our agenda and our translator/guide slowly realized the plan had to be scrapped and that we intended to pursue the itinerary we had agreed to with the owner of the company. This all sounds like pretty basic consumerism to those of us who live in the parts of the world where eGullet members tend to dwell, but rest assured by the standards of Mongolian commerce we were radicals. Ulaan Baatar (which, if you're in the know, you call "UB") is a city -- complete with some very lovely mid-century Soviet labor-camp-style architecture -- but people still ride horses right alongside the cars. A Mongolian may very well ride a horse to the minilab for one-hour photo processing. We went to the bus station after lunch. That's where all the jeeps and drivers hang out, waiting to be hired by the likes of us. After much discussion and gesticulation (J and I remained in the Nissan) a driver and his Russian jeep were hired. Our bags were transferred from the Nissan to the jeep, we bade farewell to our old driver (little did we know how dearly we'd miss him), and we set off with our new driver and vehicle. After making countless stops in preparation for our newly configured trip (we needed warm blankets in case we had to sleep out, we had to buy food and water and snacks for the same reason, and we had to get some Togrog -- Mongolian money), we got on the road. And what a road it was. There were so many potholes that we thought, surely, the dirt roads would have to be better. Oh, we were so very wrong. We arrived at our ger camp at about 10:00 that night (not that it made any difference what time it was, given that we had just flown halfway around the world) and before we knew it we were sharing a ger with our guide and driver. Um, what? The week in the Gobi gave us a taste of Mongolian culture but because we were traveling the closest thing Mongolia has to a well worn tourist road the locals weren't always overly eager to invite us into their gers. Bear in mind that tourism in Mongolia only began when the iron curtain fell so it's still a very new industry, and it hasn't grown much at that. It no doubt helped that we were a small group, and on the occasions when we stopped at the roadside ger "canteens" we paid for our food anyway so we were always welcome there. Because we stayed in ger camps (essentially a collection of traditional gers set up for travelers, with beds and a stove in the center of each, a bathroom, and a ger dining room) our breakfast was typically bread, butter, jam, one egg (usually fried), and tea. Some of the other groups, who had more organized tours, had a much more extensive breakfast spread including sliced mutton, sliced yellow cheese (in Mongolia they identify and differentiate cheeses by color and age), tea, coffee, and some pastry type things -- none of which, excluding the tea and bread, are actual Mongolian breakfast foods. Lunch was always some form of mutton. Whether it was "vegetable soup" (with mutton and hunks of mutton fat and assorted other sheep bits and pieces) or horhog (with the same, uh, inclusions) or mutton stew (which also regularly included the sheep's fur as well and sometimes included some of the grass and dirt upon which the sheep were grazing before they became boiled mutton) -- one thing you could bet the family herd on: mutton was always on the menu. Despite my desire for immersion in the local culinary culture, I became pretty savvy about eating around the mutton. The soup part of the soup was usually good, so when presented with no other option I ate the broth and the noodles and tried to fish out any slivers of vegetables and choice pieces of actual mutton meat, leaving behind "the parts," which I'm happy to report, someone certainly ate after our departure . In "restaurants" (which were often closed, so it would take some running around the gers to find someone to open up shop for us) we were often able to get eggs and a cabbage salad of sorts. J ate lots of French-fries and rice. Another thing we learned in the course of our early Mongolian culinary educations was that any and all vegetables seemed to be mixed with mayonnaise, which to me, when I'm craving fresh veggies, altogether ruins the experience. Did I mention that no one has refrigeration? They're nomads. They live in the middle of Mongolia, which has earned its status as a metaphor for "nowhere." Of course they lack electricity. They mostly store their meat on the roof of the ger. The Erdene Zu monastery was a highlight, and I can hardly convey what an unusual treat it is to be able to take photographs inside a major Buddhist site. I've been to so many, and in all but a few cases I have only the memories. But this time I was able to get some photographs as well. Here I am modeling some of the latest Mongolian fashions. My favorite food items in the Gobi were the airag (fermented mare's milk), the milk tea with the floating yogurt "skin" added in lieu of cream, the white cheese (more on that later), and, hands down, the very good yogurt (notwithstanding the hair and fur that was always an integral part of each of these delicacies). Everyone was milking the herds (primarily sheep, goats, camels, and horses) to make dairy products to eat day-to-day and to store for winter. It was difficult to find the yogurt in the Gobi, because that's more of a Kazakh food, but I knew I would have more of it in the western part of the country (the second week of the trip), which is primarily inhabited by Kazakhs. Here's some butter being stored in a sheep's stomach. Moving right along . . . a sampling of the dairy-oriented lifestyle of the Gobi: At the end of the first week we had amassed plenty of memories. It was a week of 10-12 hour days spent driving around the Gobi Desert in a jeep on crazy bumpy paths. I often hit my head on the roof on account of the velocity at which our driver progressed and the quality of the terrain we were traversing. We had no set itinerary. Our guide had never been to the Gobi Desert and knew less about it than we knew from reading the guidebook we got at Barnes & Noble in New York. Our driver turned out to be relatively psychotic -- we were told later by our guide that he had been persistent about asking her to have sex with him from day one, even though they were perfect strangers, both married. We had made a pilgrimage to an "ice cavern" where the ice had already melted. Apparently the ice lasts until July; we were there the third week of August and while there were indeed still some bits of ice, it certainly didn't seem worth the many hundreds of kilometers and four or more additional hours that we spent in the jeep getting to this famous destination. I think the driver just wanted a break -- it was his idea that we go there. J, meanwhile, had progressed to what sounded like bronchitis and perhaps even pneumonia so all of this was less than amusing at the time. But our only options were to laugh or cry -- and we chose laughter as often as possible. I can't decide which was better: the trip to the ice cavern with no ice, or the trip to the place where we were told by our driver via our translator/guide that we could see dinosaur bones but which upon further questioning (after we drove there and walked around in the desert trying to determine which thing could possibly be the dinosaur bones that were left behind -- and for that matter, why exactly didn't they take them if they found them?) turned out to be a place where some dinosaur bones had been found long ago. But most likely the best bit of tourism had to be the time when, despite all of our protestations and urgings, our driver decided to drive through what appeared to be a lake (it was the rainy season but we had been fortunate to miss most of it) because he said he wanted to follow the "road" rather than go around where there was none. Surprise! We got stuck. And there was no one around. We were not just figuratively in the Gobi Desert. We were ACTUALLY IN THE GOBI FUCKING DESERT. It's not like we could dial up AAA (or MAA) on the cell phone and ask for someone to come pull us out and maybe bring us a few TripTiks. In fact, even if we could have, they sure as hell wouldn't have been so stupid as to drive in there to fish us out because they would have gotten stuck too. I guess that incident would have to claim the crown as the hi/low of the week in the Gobi. And, on top of it all, that night we slept at a gas station, on the floor -- after we ran out of gas, that is. I don't say this very often (I doubt anybody does), but we were pretty eager to return to Ulaan Baatar. By that time it seemed like an oasis in the middle of the dessert. A Soviet-style, bleak oasis, but when you need an oasis you take whatever oasis you can get. To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII.

Fat Guy follows the Varmint theory kind of in reverse, or maybe inverse, or converse, or contrapositive, I can't keep them straight. Anyway what he does is if we're invited to a meal at someone's home and there will be kids there, and he's on the phone making the final arrangements, he will at some time during the conversation put on his serious-low-quiet voice and say, "Now listen, I want to make clear that I don't believe in or support age discrimination, so if there are any special items prepared for the kids such as chicken fingers or hot dogs I expect to have the option of eating those in addition to or instead of the other food." Kids by the way are fascinated when he eats the same food as they do.

Amazingly, we've even seen DQs in the south that close during the winter months. You can imagine my disappointment after spying the red roof and unmistakable DQ sign off in the distance only to find that there's a cardboard sign in the window that says "closed for the winter." Can you imagine? In the south? My favorite DQ in New Haven is open ALL YEAR--and there are always people there. One of these days I want to try one of the DQ cakes. Never have had the food--and don't plan to. In my mind, Dairy Queen is an ice cream destination.

I haven't been to Piece but some years ago when I was at Sally's catching up on news I heard about a place that was being opened in Chicago by someone who used to work at Sally's. Let's just say, the way I heard it, was that the guy who was a friend, worked at the restaurant without divulging his intentions (of trying to learn the trade) so he could open this place with some partners in Chicago.

I have it on authority that Sally's is baking the tomato bianca pies. It's also the season for the "summer special," a white pie with very thinly sliced zucchini, yellow squash and onion.

It very well could be a relative of the pasta fagioli--perhaps a way for the peasants, who most likely were the ones who created and ate this dish because of the inexpensive and nutritious ingredients, to have a little variety in their menus--an oven dish one day (panecotti) and a soup the next (pasta fagioli).

The Dilly Bar is a round ice cream bar: ice cream on a stick, dipped in chocolate/cherry/butterscotch dip, stored in the freezer. When I was a kid the cherry Dilly Bar was my favorite DQ treat (I think it was the name). I think it's still around. For research purposes only, of course, FG and I dragged my parents to my favorite of the local New Haven Dairy Queens in order to see the current offerings. The Blizzard, as we all know, is alive and well but there were a host of other selections. The Dilly Bar, The Buster Bar and the ice cream sandwich (I can't remember what it's called) are all still alive and well. The Misty Mist (now just called a Misty) was being promoted in the window as were the various popsicle-type items in star and circle shapes with red, white and blue color/flavors in each. The Brownie Earthquake Treat looked fantastic. I saw a family ahead of us on the line getting one. I almost asked for a bite. They also still have the Peanut Buster Parfait, though to date, I’ve never had one.