Our room is freezing cold overnight, the heating system obviously is not working. It takes some complaining but later in the afternoon an electric heater is provided that warms up the room nicely. Just hope it doesn’t tax the shabby electrical system too much and burns the building down.
After we have a breakfast at the café, we walk about two kilometers to the Erdene Zuu Monastery. From a distance it is a large square enclosure, about 300 by 300 meters square, with 108 stupas placed at regular intervals on its walls and entrance gates in the middle of all four walls. Coming through the main entrance gate it is a bit startling to see a large grassy area with only a few buildings within the enclosure. The monastery was founded in 1586 and at one point had over 100 temples, 300 Gers and over 1000 monks within in walls. The communists destroyed most of it in the 1930’s and most monks were shipped off to Siberia. Now there are three old temples left inside a secondary enclosure, a monastery and several newer looking stupas and temples. It is the most important Buddhist religious place in Mongolia and people come here from all over the country.
We spent a couple of hours walking around, answer the call of the conch shells which the monks blow on to get people to the monastery. We sit inside for a while as monks chant their verses and drink their fermented mare’s milk.
Just outside the monastery enclosure is a large historic area where one of the sons of Genghis Khan established the capital of the Mongol empire for a period of time. All that remains now, above ground that is, are the “turtle rocks” which indicated the four corners of the city. Patrick walks out to one of them to get some photos.
The rest of the afternoon is spent trying to stay warm. Once we get the electric heater things look up, but all in all our stay at Jim’s Guesthouse is not that comfortable. Pierre has spent another restday here and decides to ride out towards Ulaanbaatar with us tomorrow.
Roof details on the old temples. Supposedly there are no nails used to assemble these buildings. Patrick guesses they used many boxes of staples to install all the chicken wire under the eaves to keep the pigeons off their nice woodwork.
