A trip to the country side

We just got back after at two day trip to the country side of Mongolia. It's supposed to be really beautiful and I have to agree. The trip started on Tuesday and when we woke up we saw that it was raining outside but before we left it had changes into snowing. SNOWING! I didn't expect to see snow on this trip but I guess I had my hopes up for nothing. So when we got out to the National park to do some hiking it was extremely foggy and the wind was blowing and it was really cold. It turned out to be more car riding than hiking which was fine by us. After we had seen the things we where supposed to see we tried to drive to the family where we would spend the night. After 4 hours of driving around trying to find there winter camp (they are nomads, moving around on the country side) we met another group that told us we couldn't drive up to there camp because of the snow so we went to another camp. It felt like this camp was out in nowhere but we finally got there after driving thru the snow, we didn't even see the road. And we were driving a small Hyundai that had front-wheel drive, and we drove off-road with it (and I really med OFF-road). So we spent the night in a ger, a typical Mongolian tent. We didn't have any heat so we had a fire at the beginning of the night so the temperature most have been up to 30 degrease when we went to bed and close to 0 degrease when we woke up.

So today we went horseback riding thru the snow. It was fun but really cold. I succeeded at riding even though I haven't done it since I was maybe 10 at a zoo. At first my horse refused to move faster than 3 km/h but after a while it decided to hurry up a bit. So we went to an old temple ground from the 16th century but the temples was tern down by the Soviet when they had control of Mongolia. It was so cold outside that we decided to not take the horses back but the car so now we are sitting here at the hostel in Ulaanbaatar our last night before we are boarding the train for Beijing.