After a couple of hours driving the bus veered of the road and continued off road for the remaining 12 hours through the night to Moron, needless to say we didn’t get a lot of sleep.We easily hitched a ride to Khatgal, where we found a massive hot Mongolian breakfest (goulash) in the café and readied our maps and GPS for the first day of hiking.


We enjoyed a lovely lakeside walk North bound, starting at the very southern west tip until we lost touch of the track and found ourselves confronted with a huge rock cliff we couldn’t walk around/over. We tracked back a few hundred meters to a nice camping spot on the lakeside and pitched our tent. A friendly local from a nearby ger eased our minds as he showed us the actual track leading to Jankai, so we cooked dinner and went to bed looking forward to continuing our journey the next morning.

After a chilly night we woke up at sunrise surprised to find a light dusting of snow on our tent. After packing away our camp we sat off to Jankai and almost immediately the wather took a turn for the worse with snow and heavy winds. Slightly overwhelmed by the temperature drop we made our way through a beautiful forest track over the lakeside hills with the lake almost completely covered in thick fog. We stopped for a quick lunch and shortly afterwards found ourselves in a desolate tourist ger camp.



We noticed smoke coming from one of the chimneys and decided to investigate – with the bad weather continuing and tempted by the warmth of a wood burning stove sleeping in our tent that evening seemed like a less attractive option than a cosy ger. Luckily the owners of the camp gave us shelter in one of their many empty gers where they treated us to a warm fire straight away. Since the tourist season is over many of the ger camps along the lake are now closed which means - although accommodation isn’t all that pleantiful - there aren’t any tourists either! We enjoyed a cosy afternoon in the ger as the snow continued to fall, cooked an early noodle dinner and jumped into our sleeping bags close to the fire.

Again up at sunrise we cooked ourselves breakfast porridge and got ready for the day. From the moment we stepped out of our ger we got accompanied by two big white dogs who would loyally follow us for the rest of the day. We continued on the path from Jankai to Toilogt through more golden pine forest with crispy ground underfoot. As the weather cleared up and we emerged from the forest we were greeted with wonderful views across the lake and the surrounding snow capped mountains. We reached Toilogt in time for lunch. Still accompanied by our canine friends who had now grown in number to six (!) and together with Clara found some amusement in Alby’s best efforts to deter them with woofs and growls, we continued. Since the track deteriorates after Toilogt and we had reached our goal we started to head back South the same way we’d come. We found an excellent campsite and cooked an interesting dinner before our plans for the rest of the night changed drastically…


As the sun peeped through the roof of our ger we woke up and remembered our midnight visitors – the two oldest men of the family – who came to our ger to watch their daily episode of the Mongolian ‘Home and Away’ on a portable black and white TV powered by a car battery. After packing up our stuff we headed to the ger nextdoor where we were treated to a hot cup of milk tea and a thick slice of homemade bread. All became clear as we realised the inhabitants of our ger had bunked with the family/friends nextdoor – we found six people, two baby goats and a cat all cuddled up together in one ger. We left our hosts with gifts of food, said our goodbyes and took off by 8am.

After our first 5km we stopped for hot porridge breakie on the shoreline to fuel up. Determined as we were to hike all the way back to Khatgal we were confronted with heavy doses of sunshine, winds, snow and hail. On arrival in Khatgal we were happy to see that the sky had cleared out and after our long 22km hike we pitched our tent on the edge of town.


Quite knackered we prepared ourselves a noodle soup and (desperately) tried to keep ourselves warm before crawling into our sleeping bags for a chilly night.The next morning we found ourselves surprised to see that our tent had ice on the inside!


On our way into town we bumped into a local minivan driver who offered us a taxi ride to Moron along with some local passengers from nearby countryside making a rare trip to the city. In Moron we luckily fixed ourselves the last two seats (on the back row) on the 2pm ‘sleeper’ night bus back to UB, where we arrived at 5am the next morning, after a very bumpy and sleepless night.