Mongolia was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! I say "was", as I'm writing we'll actually still be in it for a few more hours, as we're heading southwards on the train to Beijing, enjoying our progressively warmer platform walks at each stop (I'm obviously now typing a week later, but was originally writing on my note pad, if that's not too confusing!...). I'm sure we'd have loved the uniqueness of this country however our visit had unravelled, but as it happened, everything just seemed to work out perfectly, from the weather to the people, the hostel, the food, and even the small things like the book I've been reading (book number 5 finished, Lee Child's "Gone Tomorrow", addictive, absorbing, exciting, totally culturally devoid, substance-free thriller, can't wait to read more of the books in the same series!).

So, where to start... the capital, our first stop, I suppose. Ulaanbaatar. It makes Irkutsk, the crumbling, Russian mish-mash of a city, seem like a polished, English country town by comparison! An absolutely crazy place, in the midsts of manic, haphazard development, no doubt from opportunistic, private foreign investment. The result: an array of influences all competing for prime space alongside Mongolian foundations, themselves from varying Mongolian eras, and hence cultures and styles. On our night time arrival by bus (which gave us plenty of time to look, as the bus had to compete with throngs of other honking vehicles to progress every metre) we passed row upon row of American-styled neon lights advertising snooker halls and karaoke joints. In the area immediately around our hostel, "Irish" bars and souvenir shops rub shoulders with Korean, Chinese, Indian, French and Italian restaurants. And when we walked towards the south of the city on our second day to climb up to a viewpoint we saw luxury apartments going up, with supermarkets and shops already waiting for the occupants, with imported western foods and designer clothes. Meanwhile, street stalls still sell Mongolian breads and kebabs to passersby, and run-down flats fill the gaps between all of the above. All this is held together by a network of half-built roads with holes in them and the odd bit of pavement in between mounds of earth and stretches of dirt, and then finally on top of all this is a final layer of pipes criss-crossing everthing else (the sort I imagine we have plenty of back in England too, but put underground instead)! Anyway, I've rambled on, but you get the idea, it's chaotic and exciting. One story I heard which kind of typifies Ulaanbaatar is that of the tall, arcing office tower situated in a prime location on one edge of the main square, the distinctive silhouette of which is visible from miles away. A steel and glass 30 storey structure, must have cost millions to put up. Only they cocked up the foundations, so it's unusable, and it'd be cheaper to build a new tower than fix them! So it just stands there, empty, and probably will do for some time to come, as I guess it'll cost a fair amount to take down as well!

Despite this madness, though, after two weeks of traversing five time zones of Russia, I found the friendly face(s) of Mongolia both refreshing and warming. I think the typical, ethnic Mongolian face has a certain roundness to it that would hinder a cold scowl if attempted, but I'm also sure that people were simply friendlier and more interested in us anyway (on a totally separate note, we've just passed through a Chinese station and Paula has spotted a classic piece of Chinese-English translation, "underass entrance", presumably intended to refer to an underpass!).

Our hostel, going by the imaginative title of UB Hostel (UB being the expat shortened term for Ulaanbaatar), was also a relative oasis. After three successive hostels in Russia that were unfriendly, then uncomfortable and dirty, then pokey, dark and unsecure respectively, UB was warm, comfortable, clean, bright and run by the welcoming and helpful Kim, a Korean guy with such a massive head and small body that he was more like a caricature than a real person (gutted I never managed to sneak a photo, in fact!), and his native Mongol wife, Bobby. They handily sorted out our whole week of trips to the Mongolian countryside and our train tickets to Beijing, which left us in the unusually pleasant position of just being able to enjoy ourselves, with nothing practical to sort out beyond feeding ourselves. Which leads me on nicely to the beautiful, barren wilderness that is most of what exists outside of Ulaanbaatar!...

Warning, more boring facts on their way. If not interested, please proceed to the next paragraph. Mongolia is basically a huge plateau, with an average altitude of over 1,500 metres. I didn't know that before. Amazing, virtually the whole country, one of the largest landmasses in the world (about 16th?), is all higher than our highest mountain! Maybe I'm just easily impressed. Also, there are considerably more livestock (consisting of sheep, goats, cows and horses) than humans, all of which seem to wander aimlessly around the fence-less countryside, which is pretty much devoid of anything else (i.e. trees, shrubbery, anything green (at least in October, but there's very little that looks like it could be green at any other time either), solid buildings, vehicles, etc). We passed the odd vehicle every five minutes or so, and there were a couple of buildings every 20 to 30km at a guess, but based on our sample of Mongolia, I reckon 99% of the country consists of plains of dirt or sand littered with rocks (some pebbles, some over a hundred metres high), animals, and round, white gers, the semi-permanent tents, clearly dotted against the yellow background in twos and threes here and there. Incredibly, we found out that although over a third of the population (totalling less than 3 million and making it the country with the lowest people per square kilometre statistic in the world) live in Ulaanbaatar, about 25% are still completely nomadic, upping their gers and taking their livestock to fresh pastures three or four times a year. Sorry, I sound like a textbook, but that's a flavour for you, anyway.

Our first trip was to the Terelj National Park, about an hour and a half north-east of Ulaanbaatar, just for one night. Fantastic trip with great people, Maggy from Hamburg and Ben from Stoke, both of whom I'm sure we'll keep in contact with. The weather was perfect, a massive stroke of good fortune given that a day before we left, English couple Mark and Caz, also staying at our hostel, had been telling us about the snow theyd had on the trip they had just returned from. So, amazing clear skies, which gave us warm sunshine by day and more stars by night than I remember seeing in Botswana a couple of years ago, a sight at the time I thought couldn't possibly be bettered. Horse riding was superb. I'd assumed when I saw the trip description that it was an option available to those who knew how to, but oh no, it was just a case of climbing up, ten seconds of instructions, and then plodding off away from our ger with an earring-sporting Mongolian twelve year-old (who, in all fairness, had probably been riding horses before he could walk), who provided direction and American R&B, courtesy of his portable music player. Great fun, and helped by Maggy's horse-riding tips, being the lone experienced rider amongst us foreigners, I think it was our facade of (limited) expertise that encouraged our young guide to make the bloody animals run! How I didn't fall off, I'll never know. Our hiking trip later that afternoon, up in the hills right by our ger camp, took us to the most striking scenery we saw whilst in Mongolia: steep slopes that we had to scramble up using both hands at times, fascinatingly sculpted rock formations, scatterings of golden leaved trees, and views for miles in both directions between peaks, along valleys and across the plains. Then, in the evening, came along the vodka-fest! Well aided by Ben's iPod speakers and a pack of cards, general consumption was accelerated by forfeits from the game and our first bottle of Chinggis had run dry before 10pm. Cue ten year old Mongolian with a moped, looking to make a hefty profit from some drunken Westerners, and the next (this time £15) bottle of Chinggis arrived in no time. It all gets a bit hazy after that, but I'm sure ger-dancing, deep philosophising and some vomit all ensued, not necessarily in that order.

Trip number two was six hours on the road the other side of Ulaanbaatar, to the "mini-Gobi". Repeats of the above in the following respects: excellent travelling companions in newlyweds James (from Winchester - and Sheffield Uni, clearly therefore always going to be a fine fellow!) and Edurne (from Bilbao), horse-riding, hiking, ger camping, fantastic sunshine by day (although it was freezing by night), lots of random, wandering livestock, and vodka (Edurne and a still hungover Paula sat this one out, though, leaving just James and myself to (successfully) tackle the latest bottle of Chinggis). In addition to this, however, we also had sand dunes (including mine and Paula's "three peaks challenge" - ask her if you want further details!), camel-riding, a trip to an old Buddhist temple, complete with orange robed monks (some of whom were just kids!), and a personal performance from an authentic, Mongolian throat singer, who I thought was pretty good, but Paula revealed to me later that she'd spent most of the performance biting her lip with tears in her eyes, and doing everything in her power to suppress bursting with laughter.

And so that brings our Mongolia leg to an end - amazing!

Next stop Beijing, and I really need a haircut, so expect a proper Chinese bowlhead a la Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice in the next batch of photos!