The Inside of the 'Disco Bar' from where we shot the famous 'drunken cowboy video' (I'll put it up as soon as I figure out how to make the image upright instead of lying on its side, since i shot the video with the camera turned 90 degrees)
This was what we might call a 'one horse town', though in the case of Mongolia, an expression like 'one car town' might be a lot more appropriate.

The Reddened Neck of our Dutch Companion Mark adds contrast to the blue of Lake Khovsgul, which stretches off to the left of the screen (North) some 125 kilometers to the Russian border.

A form of solar panel used for millenia by yurt dwellers, the 'cheese panel' is an ingenious invention that turns perfectly good sheep or yak cheese into dry, perfectly inedible briquettes, to stack for the winter, or even better, to give to your foreign guests to watch the expressions on their faces as the taste curdles in their mouths.

yeah, pretty geeky, all right - I took this photo in the ruins of Ghengis Khan's former capital. I couldn't resist because my mom used to run a business dresssing people up like cowboys and 'antiquing' the print with sepia tone - here was a lady doing almost the same thing we do back in Oregon - but for a fraction of a price ($1). The costumes were big and heavy, of course, and didn't open down the back with velcro the way ours do, so these people had twice as much work cut out for them.
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Reindeer encroach on our camping site before they are shooed off by the Ger Camp workers. In the background is Lake Khovsgul, on the border of Mongolia with Russia, and the deer almost certainly belong to a local family of Tsatan (pronounced like 'Satan' with accent on the last syllable) who live in teepees and only herd reindeer for a living (when they're not asking for photo money)
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Sour Grapes? No, Sour Horse Milk...

Bottles of Kumiss, or in Mongolian Cyrillic 'AIRAK', in a supermarket in Ulan Bataar - this drink, which possibly predates beer as a beverage, which fueled the fearsome mounted armies of the Khan, is made with mare's milk and a particularly vibrant bacteria - I experimented by bringing back a few liters to Korea, and innoculating ordinary (skim) cow's milk - within hours I had a slightly milder version of Airak. The original mare's milk version tastes like a mix between strong yoghurt and horse sweat, and varies between 1% and 5% alcohol content (a by-product of bacterial action, unlike yoghurt bacteria which produce lactic acid from lactose sugars in the milk). Airak cannot properly be called 'beer' because it uses bacterial instead of yeast fermentation - but Mongolia has some fine 'western' beers as well - among them 'Borgio' and a microbrew called 'Great Mongol Hops N' Malt'
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At a peebreak on the road to Khatgal, Khovsgul Lake, we engage in a minor digital camera piranha-style-frenzy. It seems many years have passed since we in The West made fun of Japanese tourists for the same kind of behavior - now I can understand the mentality (especially when you travel rough and don't want to repeat the horrific experience, but don't mind looking at the photos from the comfort of your home)

A reindeer bull grazes by the shores of Lake Khovsgul in Mongolia near the border with Russia. This was taken only ten meters away from our campsite/ger. If you look closely, you can see the trace of a broken hobble, as this is a domestic animal belonging to a local Tsatani family. Just the day before they had asked us for two dollars for taking a picture of their animals - and the next day they were all over our front lawn, free for the taking...