I don't even know where to start telling about the park. I have way to many stories to share about our internship here!

But first: after 6 weeks we can finally say: the bureaucracy is over for now, we are officially allowed to stay in Mongolia for the whole 4 months. It was quite an adventure to go up and down to China in about 32 hours by land of which we have spend 5 hours at the border and only 4 hours in China. In total it took 4 application forms, 5 reference letters, 3 pass photos, a trip to china, 2 visits to the immigration services, 2 visits to the consulate in UB and 2 visits to the consulate in China. Luckily, two office managers were sent to China with us, to help us arranging our paperwork and to do shopping for the camp, which made it a fun trip.

Time to explain more about our life on the steppe! It is an interesting way of life. Being in the camp is very peaceful and quiet (except for the many tourists that arrive everyday). The camp consist of a couple of buildings and gers for tourists to spend the night. Outside of the tourist area is the staff area. All the fulltime staff (13), have their own gers and live there mainly with their families. The parttime staff stays in dorms or little houses. Interesting, fulltime work here means all year round, while parttime means only staff for the summer. And then there is our house! The students house with 3 rooms. We share a basic room with 2 beds, a table and a closet. What more do we need anyway. We had it all by ourselves but after a week or 2, Japanese students joined us. The funny Japanese. We opened the fridge and they had stored lots of beers, meat and vodka. Every night we heard them giggling after drinking vodka. They stayed for about 3 weeks and have finished 12 bottles of vodka and countless trays of beer. Around the house animals are grazing and we often have horses or cows blocking the door. Sometimes a herd of 300 sheep ánd goats passes by. I love it!

The camp is surrounded by hills. When we arrived the hills were a bit brown, but now after lots of rain the hills are green and more plants are growing. All you can see are hills, all you can smell is fresh steppe herbs, all you can feel was the fresh air. This is nature. The weather is quite unpredictable, in a short while, it can be rainy, sunny, cloudy or windy. So what they say about the Netherlands (you can have 4 seasons in 1 day), is also applicable to Mongolia! Some days it can be 30 degrees and sunny, while the next day it can be 20 degrees with rain.

A staff van is driving twice a week to the city to transport people and to do groceries. We are joining around 2-3 times a month, usually for only one day. After being used to living on the steppe, the city is waaaay to chaotic and busy in which we don't want to spend too much time. However, we are getting used to the traffic, we even dare to cross the road (they will stop right?). We also figured out how taxis work. Well, every car in UB is a taxi. A weird idea, but you just stand next to the road waving at cars and if you're lucky you will have a car stopping within 2 minutes. They will charge per kilometre so no weird extremely high prices for tourists. We usually have a couple of hours to spend in the city which means we are rushing through our list of doing shopping, eating lunch and use the internet. The duration of the ride back to Hustai is somewhere between 1.5 hours and 6 hours.. It is always the question when we will arrive at Hustai. If we are lucky, the driver stops only once and we will reach after 1.5 hours. Last week it took an adventurous 6 hours. First, the traffic was completely jammed, cars that didn't give space to each other didn't really help to solve the traffic jam. It was a nice and hot day, together with 4 tourists in another car we were waiting patiently. After 3 hours we were finally out of the city, yay. On our way to UB we were already joking that the car was going to fall apart at some point because the motor stopped a few times. We should learn to not make jokes about that.. our van didn't break, but the other car did! We suddenly saw 4 tourists sitting next to the road, o wait those are our tourists! Flat tire! The guys in our car had changed the tire within 15 minutes. It would have helped if the spare tire wasn't flat too. Without saying anything the driver took the tire and drove back towards UB, with our bags still in the car.. There we were, standing in the middle of nowhere without our water or food. Besides the hunger, it was fun! We spoke to the tourists and explained the whole history of the park and enjoyed the scenery of grazing livestock. We could see horses, cows, sheep and goats, all peacefully grazing on the steppe. After 1 hour our car was back and they had somehow managed to fix the broken tire. At 11 we finally reached the camp and we almost ran into the restaurant for food.

Our research is going well. We do lots of observations in the park to observe the behaviour of the tourists and the drivers. Very interesting and also very concerning. We have a lot of fun on the mountains. After a couple of hours you get bored of looking at people through a binocular, so what to do where no one can see you or hear you (hopefully)? We have made up songs about the horses or about the park and we joke around a lot. it is interesting to observe what people are doing around the horses! We are usually being picked up again in time, except for yesterday! Now we can laugh about it though. I wasn't angry, it can happen right? People forget something sometimes right? It wouldn't be such a problem in the afternoon but it was almost 8 already and the drive would take another 30 minutes and we ran out of water and food. After one hour of waiting, we patiently decided to walk to the nearest building. A car stopped with one of the employees saying: Yeah sorry, the driver took tourists, you just wait. The hadn't even forgotten us, they had purposely decided to leave us on the steppe, haha thanks buddies. But there are worse places to be stuck! Luckily at the building there was water and a van was going to the camp so we could join. I had to laugh, when were they planning to pick us up if we didn't start walking?

We were told in the beginning that we could also do some guiding sometimes during busy days. We thought it would be nice to do guiding. After doing guiding in an elephant sanctuary, a sea turtle project and guiding people through indigenous villages, I felt quite competent in guiding people around and was excited. Unfortunately we did not do any guiding yet so we asked the manager for it. Ok I call my assistant to tell him. Almost all the communication goes through the walkie talkie and within 1 minute he shouted back, let them come here now. What, does it mean we have to go guiding NOW? We walked a bit unsure towards him (we and our big mouth.. we thought), he asked so who is going first? Without thinking Tessa pointed to me and within seconds I was guiding a group of 2 tourists. A bit unexpected but it went well and I enjoyed it very much!

For tourists, the camp organizes a folk band that will perform when it is busy! I am a big fan, they play original horse fiddles and they do the throat singing. Ok singing through your throat, interesting.. but making 5 different sounds with only your throat, how?! I've seen the band a couple of times and it still impresses me. It is always a nice happening and the staff is interested too so after a day of work, it is a nice way to relax with the staff and enjoy music. By now we recognize most of their songs and we even have our favourite song. We were lucky enough to be able to witness their 10th anniversary concert where they also invited dancers and other singers. They showed us the famous Mongolian long song, where they stretch the tones very long and they reach very high tones. It was amazing! A dancer showed us some dancing and that made the concert overall very enjoyable.

This update should do!