20250904 Thursday, September 4, 2025. Farewell to the Gobi

20250904 Thursday, September 4, 2025. Farewell to the Gobi

We leave the Gobi today so we had to have our suitcases packed up and outside by 7am so they could be trucked overland back to Ulaanbaatar.  Now that we have experienced the roads of the Gobi first hand, we appreciate that we will be flying back in the Cessna Caravan rather than overland.

This morning has been at a much more leisurely pace, which has been appreciated since we have been covering so many sights each day since our arrival to the Gobi.

Mongolian English Breakfast

After breakfast we got to play dress up in Mongolian costumes in a ger decorated with traditional furnishings.

Then we got a chance to learn how Mongolians do archery.  They hold the bow with their dominant hand, and draw the bowstring with their thumb rather than their index and middle fingers.  These techniques are optimized for shooting from horseback.

A guest artist, Naigaa Enkhbaatar, also made his way from Ulaanbaatar to demonstrate Mongolian calligraphy to us.  During Soviet rule, Mongolians were forced to give up their script and use the Cyrillic alphabet, but since the fall of the USSR, there has been a resurgence in reviving the native language and script.  Like in Chinese calligraphy, the script can take on artistic expressions.  The Mongolian script flows vertically from top to bottom, and is generally arranged from left to right.  The artist then took audience requests for small panels.  We had him paint the Mongolian script for Happiness, and also a panel for the newlywed Tom and Ciara.

He then did an outdoor demonstration of an art form he is developing for live performance in which he paints behind a screen in conjunction with a sound track.  It is a beautiful art form.  It reminded of sand shadow painting performances we have seen during our travels.  

The sky was filled with clouds and the temperature was in the upper 60’s.   We actually had a little bit of spitting from the clouds, but nothing as serious as a cloud burst.  A heavy rain would severely impact our drive to the airport.  

We had our final lunch with the restaurant staff and bid them farewell.  For the most part, the food service was generous, but the meats tended to be overcooked and dried out or chewy.  We do look forward to boarding the ship soon.

We mounted our SUV steads for the trip to the airport at 3:30pm.  While we started out on the same dirt two tracks for about 20 minutes, we climbed up onto the end of a paved toll highway, and zoomed towards the airport.  After having become accustomed to going cross country in our SUV’s , it was a bit of shock to be back on actual smooth pavement.

We boarded our outbound flight without having to do any security, but we did have to go through the usual TSA styled security to return to Ulaanbaatar.  There were two identical planes, and we had uneventful smooth flights across the countryside below the cloud deck for the most part.

Mining activity below

It was a very scenic flight.  We were a low enough altitude that it was easy to spot vehicles driving on the 2 tracks that pass for highways in the Mongolian plains.  I’d be tempted to refer to it as the Mongolian outback.  We flew over lots of plains and rolling hills, in addition to several mountain ranges.  We could spot a few mines from the environmental impacts evident from 14,000 ft.

Rural settlement

Suburbs of Ulaanbaatar

Ulaanbaatar could easily be seen as we approached it as it is really the only urban development in Mongolia.  There are mountains immediately adjacent to the runway approach for Ulaanbaatar’s original international Airport, which is no primarily used for domestic flights.  The plane actually has to dive quite steeply and fly very close to the tops of these mountains on the approach to the runway.  The approach was actually close enough to trigger a “Terrain” warning from the plane’s avionics.  It makes for an interesting flight seeing tour.

The charter company has it’s hanger in a remote part of the airport, and the taxiway connecting it to the main taxiways is overgrown with weeds, so it felt a little like we had to make one last off road venture in Mongolia before disembarking the plane.
Traffic leading into the city was not nearly as bad as traffic heading out of the city, but it was certainly stop and go for quite a bit.

It sure was nice to get back into the Shanghai-La Hotel, even if only for a few hours. No more beetles all over the place, and a nice full force hot shower.  

We had a farewell dinner at the Hotel’s Hutong Restaurant, which as the name implies, serves Beijing Chinese cuisine.  Having just spent nearly a week in Beijing, we would have to give it our stamp of authenticity.  There was so much left over food on the turntable after everyone was stuffed that we felt a bit guilty, but Alma insisted the restaurant would box up the leftovers and the drivers could eat it or take it home to their families.

Interesting Cheesecake presentation.

We have just a few hours to rest up.  The bus will leave for the new international airport at 3am, and we will need to have our luggage out by 2:45am.  The flight takes off at 6:20am, but it may take 2 hours to get to the airport, even at 3am.  Guess we’ll be dozing off on the plane.