As I said it is difficult to find information about the journey to the lake. Our Mongolian friends helped us a lot. The first option to reach the lake is to take an 1 hour 20 minutes flight to Moron and then 3 hours of a car drive. The other option is to go to Moron by bus in 12 hours and again 3 hours of car drive. We’ve chosen to take the plane going there and bought out tickets from Mongolian Air. We tried buying them first online but the website is not good and apparently there may be some problems so we bought them from a travel agency. We couldn’t find a plane ticket for the return so we will take the bus back and we’ll see how that works out. (After edit: Don’t take the bus if you really have to :D. They say it’s coach but they are really old buses and very uncomfortable. It took really 12 hours but it was a tiring experience.)
Ulaanbaatar-Moron journey. In Mongolia everything works slow (for us). I highly recommand you to keep this in consideration especially if you live in a country where life is really fast. For instance we said to ourselves “Ok today we exchange our money, buy the plane tickets, arrange the hotel and the return tickets.”. All these take more than one day despite our Mongolian friends. And also our flight was first at 3.30pm then got delayed to 5pm and finally to 11.50pm. So it’s good to be prepared to these kind of situations and to go early to the airport even your flight is local.
Chinggis Khaan International Airport domestic flight section is a small area. There are some cute small shops where you can buy food. After the security we were in a very small waiting area and again got into a very small plane; maximum 45 people capacity. That explains the difficulty of finding plane tickets. After 1 hour and 20 minutes we landed in a small airport with a small building. A guy with a flashlight were showing us the way.
When we get out you immediately feel that you are in a special place. The sky is very close just like Nothern Norway which makes you feel like you are at the end of the world.
Then the 3 hours long car drive started. We’ve been told that the roads are much nicer than before and it was nice. It was middle of the night, we were sleepy and couldn’t see much but it was a nice car drive with beautiful Mongolian music. When we asked our guide when is it cold here he replied laughing “All the time.”. He said people living here move to other places in winter because of the temparature is between -30-40. But he is very happy because Mongolians can live, sleep and go wherever they want and he is aware of this freedom.
After 2 hours he said we are close to the lake, we left the main road a reall off-road experience began 🙂 There was no road and we kept going through the forest and then came the fog. Finally we saw the lake on our right. After a little more bumpy driving we stopped and saw 3 people running to us smiling. They took us to our tent which was already heated. We lied on our beds and fell asleep watching the lights on the walls of the tent coming from coming from the fire.
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