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After I got back from Tsenkher with Nasaa, I got a text message from my friend Danny asking why I wasn't up in Erdenet getting ready for the tubing trip down the Selenge river. I wasn't planning on going on the trip which had been talked about since our first summer. I'm not much of an outdoors type (I prefer calling it "between-doors") but I had just enjoyed my first non-work related trip to the countryside in a while and wanted to get away again. Plus, work was really slow and the water and power would be out for most of the week anyway. What was I going to miss?

So, I bought the last bus ticket, told Nasaa and my office that I'd be away for a week, packed a bag, and thought about buoyancy. After a 12 hour drive to UB, a night on a friend's floor, and another 7 hour drive to Erdenet, I was in the market haggling over the price of inner tubes. We gathered supplies - beer - and drove to the soum, home to Colin one of the trip's architects, that would be our embarkation point. We camped next Colin's ger and began inflating the tubes the next day. One Mongol, who had completed a similar trip from upstream on the same river, would accompany us. He had secured three huge tractor tires which we would use to make a raft. Check out the pictures.

We had intended to travel up to 200 km and reach Sukhbaatar soum near the Russian border, but that proved overly optimistic. We ended up going 70 km, as the crow flies, in three full days of tubing. The river was mostly shallow and winding so it would have taken us over a week for the whole trip. We had already lost five out of our original 13 members due to bad skin reaction caused by our chosen Chinese inner tubes. In the end, we stopped 10 km from the nearest soum and were lucky to encounter a group of farm workers who agreed to drive us into Darkhan where many were scheduled to take part in Peace Corps training. I got to see all the new trainees and dry out before heading back to site. It was something I won't soon forget. Thanks to M17 Hanna Kim for providing most of the pictures in my Flickr set.