RE: Nerd By Northwest #202 – “Truth Hurts… Sometimes Literally”

Pretty good... got to see many parts of western Mongolia we'd never seen before. We even went about as far west as we could, at the foot of a glacier and mountains right at the Russian border. The weirdest part of it all is since the country's borders have been locked down, there are practically no foreign tourists. So being a non-Mongolian traveling through got me a lot of looks. One of our hosts even joked, asking if I brought the coronavirus with me... 😏

I enjoyed myself personally, but I have to admit the van tour we were on would be a bit of an ordeal by average Western tourist standards, so you have to be comfortable with roughing it. The food was mostly just standard Mongolian food which tends to be basic by Western tastes (though the Kazakh food we had for a couple nights in the far west was awfully good). Only a handful of the places we stayed had shower facilities, and even those were very basic. Lastly, the average restroom facilities during our trip consist of either outhouses or a patch of ground behind a large rock or bush. So if you're not comfortable with squatting to do your business, the tour may not be your cup of tea!