July 2009
You know you are in for a tasty treat when you have this burnt carcass staring back at ya.
At the entrance to Khorgo Volcano, there is a small camp with a few stalls, and an impromptu parking lot where the other guides seemed to hang out. Our guide walked away from us for a bit to do some business with one of the stall owners next to the trail head. She was older, weathered, and as cheery as you can get being in a damp cold forest in the middle of nowhere. She had a dog laying idly in the middle of the trail head, I guess there wasn't much to do in the wilderness.
They seemed to know each other quite well, and due to her mannerisms and the amount of wrinkles on her forehead, I got the impression that she was a permanent fixture in the park, and had been for quite some time. He handed her some money and received a plastic bag full of something, and told us to start heading up the mountain. We walked over the dog, went up and down and came back to the camp. It was only then did I realize that the dog had been dead for some time, and no one had bothered to move it.
We left the volcano and wandered down to the nearby lake where we stopped off for lunch. It was then I got to see what was in the package, Mongolian marmot with it's legs and head chopped off, that had been gutted, and stuffed then thrown into an oven as is for a couple of hours before being sold. These animals are endangered in Mongolia, and there are strict fines for killing them, but there is no way to enforce this in the country, and so we had our lunch.
It tasted gamey, very very gamey, and after a few bites thought it was best to down some vodka in a vain attempt to keep myself from getting sick, as I always do when I travel because I eat stupid shit like marmot. I don't normally drink much, but after hammering back about 6 shots of vodka in about 20 seconds I was immediately drunk, which was better than getting sick in the long run, but not better then because we still had 6 hours of driving left to go that day. I have a video somewhere of the drunken hilarity...
