I need to write out to the contact list soon…it’ll likely be similar to this post and others though. Eh, well.
So, in grand order of the title above:
Buyant death march
Some PCV came up with a cool idea to take a long hike to visit another volunteer then take a car back. Due to the weather (it snowed an incredible amount – about 4″) the Friday night before, we instead decided to take the car there then hike back so as to let the snow/bad weather recede a little. So, we already knew it was 25km (~15 1/2 miles) by the road, but we were going to follow a river back, so it was likely going to be a bit farther than that. Big-ass hiking boots, check. Layers, check. Bullion-cube-in-case-we-get-hopelessly-lost-and-need-flavoring-per-travel-recommendations, check. What I didn’t take into account was how snow affects the basic concept of walking. That snow really saps a lot of your energy, and we had these land mogul-type humps near open bodies of (frozen-ish) water that, when covered with snow, hid where the divots between them were, so it was really easy to slip and fall if you misjudged a bump. The snow factor probably took the most out of me – I was a little nervous of getting my pants wet if I couldn’t see where ice was thin (under that snow) in wet areas, but that didn’t happen too much. I’m also lucky that my boots didn’t give me blisters – I know some people got em just after the first third of the hike and a few more did by the end. There was wind on and off too which we tended to walk into…
Still, in retrospect it was really fun – some pictures are being uploaded to Picasa, and we had some silly times and neat things to see. We found and returned a lost baby goat, saw a huge (eagle’s?) nest up in some rocks, jumped over/made rock stepping stones various rivers, and likely startled unknown numbers of countryside-dwellers with the sight of 11 foreigners tramping around in the middle of nowhere. I also near the very end almost fell (off a mogul of course) face-first into a huge pile of horse shit, which made me quite grumpy at the time.
It’s also the farthest by, oh, 10 miles at least, that I’ve ever walked, so I’m happy that I survived it. We may go on another death march, but perhaps with an overnight camping break, as it’s about half again as far as this soum. Only in Mongolia do 11 people of varying states of fitness decide to go on a 15+ mile hike after a relatively heavy snowfall and in freezing weather…
The return of vodka
On April Fool’s, coincidentally a local PCV’s birthday, vodka appeared back on the shelves all over Khovd. Insert expected shenanigans here, esp. as many people are not working this week due to school breaks. I also got to eat tasty lemon cookies.
Link of my day
As posted on Slashdot, Skewz is an unfortunately named website that does a really cool thing – it sorts news online using user submissions (on a continuum) from liberal to conservative. The submitted links also have a sort of meta-commentary in that the links with their associated blurb can have comments on their slant, and the comments themselves can be rated on a liberal-conservative continuum. That’s definitely a feature I’d like to see on other comment sections, though tagging is another idea. But the continuum idea tends to limit, obviously – but I’d also be interested in seeing continua for other slants – libertarian, etc – as the ideological spectrum is more than the one-dimensional “left” and “right”.
Tags: hiking, politics, vodka
And thanks to those who sent me almost a dozen “sampler” bottles of smirnoff when you know full well the only hard liquor I can get here is vodka. 
