Before heading home to the States, I decided to go visit my friends Christina & John in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. What an adventure! I spent several days in "UB" while they finished up school, then we all headed out on a van tour of the desert. Mongolia is incredibly beautiful and such a fascinating place.

Here are a few of my favorite pics:

My favorite camel. We were in a national park in the middle of the Gobi, and we rode camels & horses up a valley to a little canyon filled with ice. I don't know if you'd properly call it a glacier because it didn't really flow... but it also never fully melted. Anyway, this was my first (and probably last) camel-riding experience!


Downtown UB (notice the herdsman herding his critters along the river):

Tsuki Theater, UB

Christina & John Konopaski


UB from the American School (where C & J worked):


Mongolian Parliament Building:



Buddhist Monastary, UB:
These little girls sold bags of rice for 50 cents that you could use as offerings to Buddha:


Dawn over the steppe:



John, Christina & I on our way out to the Gobi:


Into the desert:

The highway. Yup, this is it (and this was one of the nicer sections):


Provincial capital in the Gobi:


The emptiness was both shocking and beautiful:


One of our ger camps. We arrived at 3 in the morning and woke up to a crazy windstorm. We looked out to what seemed like the surface of the moon... miles and miles of rocky nothingness...