Horse riding and finishing a placement
on Sarah in Mongolia (Mongolia), 03/Jun/2010 01:47, 34 days ago
The weather in Mongolia has finally warmed up, literally within a couple of weeks we have gone from pretty chilly days under 5 degrees to sweltering in temperatures above 30! The plus side is I am finally changing from a very pasty white (having spent all winter covering every exposed piece of flesh) to a slightly darker ivory colour! My poor skin isn't quite sure what is going on!Anyway we made the most of the beautiful weather and over the weekend I organised a horse riding trip. 4 of us headed out to a camp near Zuunmod on Friday evening to ride over to Manzushir monastry, 20-25 km away. The first night we stayed in a ger at the site and got to take a short walk around the surrounding hills. Because we had a few days of rain everything is turning green and it is quite beautiful!The next morning we were off on horse back across the beautiful green landscape. It was a nice ride, even if we did spend a lot of it riding alongside the road. We had quite a few flat spaces where we were able to get a good canter going which was nice. The best bit of riding we did was through the national park up to the Monastry. We rode through the trees which still had piles of frozen snow beneath them, alongside a lovely river. It was beautiful scenery.The Monastery is situated on top of a hill overlooking the national park which is beautiful. The ruins of the old monastery sit beside the newer Monastery and there were many families there enjoying the beautiful weather.From the Monastery we headed back out of the national park to camp for the night. It was an interested experience as the tents were pretty small and most of the poles were broken! But we survived and stayed dry which was the main thing!The next day we rode back to the camp across more flat plains where we got to do more fast riding and see beautiful flowers!When we got back to the camp they were setting up some new tourist gers and I enjoyed sitting in the sunshine watching them put them together. It is a really interesting process and so simple! I suppose it has to be as traditionally most families moved with the seasons and the availability of food for their animals, so they had to be able to pack everything onto the back of camels and move quickly!Although the weekend was great it was a sad week too as I finished my work with CMTU. I have very much enjoyed having the variety in my work of spending time at the trade union and I have learned a lot about trade union activities. It was also nice to be raising funds for projects closer to my heart - human rights, international law training and environmental projects.