Ölgii (Өлгий)

Sunday, June 8, 2014

On arrival we rushed around and picked a hotel. The one we liked was full. Ended up making a poor choice of room in a good hotel, which was fixed the next day with a room swap. After a spending a year searching for hotel rooms, one would think that we would not be making such rookie mistakes. Oh well. The supermarkets and items available within them are getting better as we get closer to Russia. We even found a passable bottle of red wine. First wine in quite some time. Dinner was at Pamukkale Restaurant, where we had two very nice kebabs and chips. The chips were wonderful.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Lazy day was had. A little relaxing, a little window shopping and a little cleaning of the very dusty Sterlin. Tried to catch-up on email and internet, but the internet gods were not helping. Maybe tomorrow. And as the photo suggests, we did find some drinks.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Another lazy day today. Spent most of the morning on the more reliable Internet sorting out our trip to Japan and our Uzbekistan visa/LOI. The hotel kept having power outages so we relocated to a nearby restaurant with both electricity and Internet. Unfortunately their coffee was bad and the milky tea was worse. The salad however was wonderful.

As we headed back to the hotel we saw a couple of over-landers from Western Australia in their mighty fine converted Nissan Patrol. Justin and Jennifer started in Vladivostok and were heading west to Europe before heading south to Africa. It was nice to talk to them, get their perspective on things and have a tour of their home. We are still designing our ideal next expedition vehicle in our heads.

Sterlin got a much needed car wash. The dust gets everywhere and there is now less of it inside the car. We know this won’t last and will all change back on the very next dirt road. Dinner was in a new dining establishment and we celebrated our last or second last night with several all-to-familiar meat dishes. The meal was washed down with a passable bottle of red wine. After dinner we frequented the local nightclub, now that was a and and interesting experience.

Vodka anyone?
Justin and Jennifer overlanding from Western Australia.
Sterlin getting washed.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Headed to the Mongolian/Russian border. Not sure of the state on the Internet for the next few days, so updates might be a little lacking. Hard to believe we will be in Kazakhstan in 6 days. Not sure if we will cross the border later today or camp at the border and cross tomorrow. Maybe one more stay in a Ger before we say goodbye to the wilds of Mongolia.