A Trip to Mongolia – Day 3
A tough day awaited me with a seven hour tour to the Hustai national park whose main attraction are wild horses. At the hotel’s reception I talked to a Japanese couple who made the tour two days earlier and anxiously asked them about a justifiable concern. How about toilets? The answer was as expected. Brace yourself, the situation is dire. Uh, okay, understood. Since my hotel caters to mostly Japanese tourists, I got a Japanese speaking guide, who arrived together with a driver who spoke only Mongolian.
Off we went over a bumpy highway, then turned into the much bumpier dirt roads and rumbled along. In a Toyota Prius by the way, which I found astonishing, having expected a jeep. The first stop was the “mini Gobi” which are a few sand dunes, all right, but which were covered in grass, since it has rained a bit more than usual and thus they didn’t look like desert sand dunes at all.
Well, you gotta be grateful for the rain here. Then we went on to the official entrance of the national park which comes along with a ger village which is a hotel of sorts, but a cheaper one than I stayed in. They had common toilets and a common shower. Of course I used the toilet stop, but it was only ten in the morning. They made me watch a fifteen minute information movie in the visitor center in German, wow, then we went with the Prius into the park. There are quite a lot of marmots around and one even posed for the camera, cute!
But no horses far and wide. At one of the mountains my guide made me walk up half that mountain with him because he claimed to have seen horses in the few trees up its top. It was quite a hike but no horses anywhere. Though the landscape and the view were fantastic.
We hiked for the better part of an hour and were back at our car at noon. On we went to another horse hotspot over bumpy dirt roads with at times terrifying tilt angles. Such bumpy roads are not good for your bladder. We passed one building that my guide explained to me was a horse research center and next to it stood a stall. “I guess that’s a toilet.” “Well, if you want to go there…” Yes, I did. It turned out to be a nasty deep hole in the ground with four wooden walls around it. But better than nothing. As the pictures show you cannot go behind a bush, since there is no bush…… So, don’t look too closely, hold your breath and get it over with. My guide did not drink anything the whole time, the driver sipped from small water bottle once in a while and their bladders are made of steel. I also took care with the water intake, not so advisable considering the heat though.
At the second horse hotspot we walked for another half an hour and no horses, the only thing we found was the skin of a snake 
