Day 19:

"One more up and down”.  As we chose our van seats for the day, everyone did their utmost not to sit with those who were worse for wear….just in case.

It was another very long day of driving.  Basically the last 3 days of the trip was about driving back to Ulan Bataar.  After 4-5 hours on the tracks we stopped for our last lunch and used up what we had.  This consisted of sardines, pate and tuna.  Unfortunately the vegetarians got a bit of a raw deal with just cucumber and tomatoes in their sandwiches as we had ran out of cheese.  We looked out over the tracks that had now become a similar sight to our eyes, wondering which track we would take after lunch.  It only hit me today that it was pretty amazing that none of the 15 travellers smoked.

After lunch we had a 2 hour drive to the Hustai NP and the last 20 minutes was on a proper road!  At the information centre we were ecstatic to see that they also had a tourist ger camp here with proper bathrooms.  We saw ourselves in large mirrors for the first time in 2.5 weeks.  At the information centre we saw a presentation about the wild horses and we took some photographs of photographs – in case we never got to see the real things, as they are really hard to spot.  Following this, we went looking for the Taikhi horses, the only wild horses in the world; they have stripes on their bottom half of their legs and are always a sandy colour.  There are only a few in the world and in this park of 50000 hectares there were 16 groups.  We were extremely lucky when within only 15 minutes of driving we saw a group of horses, we had the guide in our van and she pointed out the group on the hillside, it was a stallion group and we got within about 150 metres of them so we managed to get some good footage and photographs. 

Once we left the park we drove a further 15 minutes to a small sand dune area for our last night’s camping.  It was nothing spectacular just an open area covered in spiky grass with small sand dunes on one side.  Dinner was "left overs”.  We had the horrible job of cleaning the pots and pans, so that they could be stored until next year.  Left over tins and produce was split 4 ways for the drivers and Solongo.