The Monastry of Erdene Zuu Khiid is one of the highlighs of a tour of Mongolia. Situated in the old city of Kharkhorin (once for a short period the capital of the Mongol Empire) the Monastry was started in the late 1500's and eventually housed up to 1000 monks and 60-100 individual temple buildings. The monastry was closed and largely destroyed in 1937 as a result of a Stalin purge, the monks were either killed or imprisoned. We tooks a tour of the main remaining temples with a delightful young lady who tried to bring us up to speed on the 500 gods of the Budhist religion; but unfortunately we only grasped a little. Still the monastry is impressive.

Outside the monastry we had a conversation (if you can call it that) with three young Mongolians driving a small truck refrigerator van. They gave us ice-creams from their truck while we showed them around our truck and took their photos while they sat at our dinette table.

From Kharkhorin we continued west with the intention of finding a "side road" to Tsenkher Hot Springs, an experiment in navigating Mongolia secondary "roads".

At a fuel stop not far from KK we met a couple (from Belgium) on a tandem bicycle on a one month tour of Mongolia.

The turn off to Tsenkher proved a little difficult to find but eventually we were on the track heading towards the town of Tuvschruulekh and its nicely accented main street (red and white posts along each side). A little searching found the correct exit track up a steep hill. The remainder of the afternoon we spent traveling across the steppes on tracks that varied between good wheel tracks and non-existant wheel tracks.


We camped the night just beside the track with a couple of herds of horses about 5 km from the hot springs.