Meat Feast

Day 26: Ulaanbaator (MNG). Karen and I have so much to learn. That wasn't a problem to us – in fact that's the main reason we had embarked on this voyage of discovery. To learn about ourselves, about each other and about other cultures. And Mongolia was kind enough to teach one of the differences between travelling and holidaying: Question your unquestioned premises.

At the start of our adventure Karen and I had held staid views that suggested whenever you were in a foreign county you had to embrace the culture fully; the concept of going to a western style restaurant chain and ordering western food filled us with horror. But there we were, sat in 'Khaan's Irish Pub', surrounded by other westerners, devouring pizza, chips, bread & butter pudding, Coca Cola and mugs of cappuccino – and it was truly heaven!

Arriving in Ulaanbaator a week previously, we instantly took a liking to the quality and value of food on offer in this fascinating country (bargain of the week has to be a three course meal with drinks for the equivalent of about £1.50: Mutton broth, mutton pasties, mutton dumplings & rice cooked in mutton stock - Baaaa!). But in a country where cattle outnumbered people by 20 to 1 and whereby the short summers and hostile winters prevented the cultivation of much in the way of fruit or vegetables (and a lack of hard cash prevented their import) therein lay the problem: It was just meat, meat and more meat – and our frail western bodies just couldn't cope; our digestive systems in melt-down. Without being too crude or going into too much detail – I couldn't stop going to the toilet and Karen couldn't go at all! By mid week, we both started smelling of the mutton dinners we were ingesting as our bodies tried to remove the excess protein by 'sweating' it out.

“What would you do here if you were a vegetarian?”, Karen pondered, as she slapped another dollop of tomato ketchup on to her pizza. Looking up from my food, I caught site of Aron and the rest of the guys from the hostel, freshly returned from their trip to the Gobi desert. With the same monotonous choice of food that we had for the last week their first port of call on arriving back in UB was 'Kaan's Irish Pub' for something 'different' and western.

Fancy a McDonald's anyone?