Hulk SMASH!

It was surprisingly hard to make the Incredible Hulk's arms stay attached to his body but thankfully he lasted until the party and the young birthday boy proceeded to pull off the Hulk's head once the candles were blown out and had a photo holding it like a hunting trophy. The next generation are a bloodthirsty lot.

Ziggy played keytar

It's an early effort but one of my favourites - the old keytar cake. It was huge and had to be cut into several pieces to be moved. I used the roasting dish to make the cake and trimmed part off to make the...neck? That bit that sticks out.

You can be my wing man anytime

What do you make for a friend with a Top Gun fetish? Well obviously a cake with their face on it, wearing aviators and a mustache. Duh. I had another friend turn the photo into a stencil and cut the shapes out of black fondant and put them all back together on the cake. It even looks like him.

I want my baby back, baby back, baby back...

That's right! It's a baby bag made of cake! There are surprisingly few ideas floating around for baby shower cakes but I managed to find something similar to this on the net to copy. It involved three layers - two chocolate and one coconut - and went down pretty well although one person (who wasn't involved in the baby shower) saw a picture and said she wasn't sure she would be able to eat something that looked like nappies, even if they were made of icing. For the record, they tasted great.

Hey! There's a yak in my ger!

Finally, the last of the Mongolia trip! We ventured into the north where all the thermals I packed finally came in handy. This part of the country, we discovered, is home to large hungry predatory birds and delightfully shaggy yaks. At one of our ger camps a trio of intrepid yaklings (or whatever baby yaks are called) crept into our ger where The Bob was napping and made off with our welcome mat. I was outside watching a goat being slaughtered for our dinner when I looked up and noticed a fuzzy backside sticking out of the door (the yak's, not The Bob's). Without thinking, I blurted out, "Hey! There's a yak in my ger!" and then enjoyed the fact that it was perhaps the quintessentially Mongolian statement.
This was also the area where I got to go horse riding, feeling like an ogre perched atop the small but sturdy Mongolian horses. My first horse was an enthusiastic fellow I named Peanut Brownie and the second was a rather lazier steed whom I named Garth on account of his mullet mane.
We saw waterfalls, volcanoes, ancient deer stones, enormous bugs and impressive monasteries. We even stopped in at the Mongolian hot pools and although it wasn't quite the Waiwera I had imagined, it was still relaxing to sit in the two knee-deep pools.
Our trip finished up with a couple of days back in the city where we had the misfortune to be staying in the same hotel and were once again plagued with queries from the front desk as to when we would "closet". The strangest experience involved a small Russian child using his room key to accidentally unlock our door at 11pm - apparently one key could open more than one door. We wedged a chair under the handle and didn't sleep very well that night. A short trip to Seoul ended our holiday and we returned to NZ where for a week afterward I would wake up in the night and not remember if I was in my room or a ger. I miss Mongolia.

I Am Not a Tourist! Mongolia Part Two

We met our fellow travelers the night before we set off for the Gobi Desert. Our group was an easygoing mix of Kiwis, Brits, an Italian, a Swiss fellow and a voracious Belgian couple, anxious to buy or take anything within reach. The next morning we piled into three Russian vans with our guide Khishgee, drivers Puntsag, Bayaraa and Jigmee and a woman named Mendee whose family ger we stayed in on our first night. Mendee was catching a ride home from Ulaan Baatar but decided to stay on for the whole tour and help with the cooking and cleaning up. Her English was basic but good enough to joke with us tourists. She rode in our van for the first leg, taking pictures and chatting. "Cashmere," she grinned, pointing at The Bob's hairy legs. We headed south to her family's cluster of traditional huts, known as gers or yurts in Russian. The herd of surprisingly flatulent goats owned by Mendee and her husband were a great source of entertainment. From there the ride over the rollercoaster dirt tracks took us south to the Yol Valley, stopping along the way at another huddle of family gers to try airag, the traditional, slightly alcohol drink made from fermented horse milk. It had a mildly fizzy, sour taste but was surprisingly palatable. Unfortunately, one member of the tour discovered he was highly allergic after downing a bowl and a half and had to go back to the nearest hospital with Khishgee while the rest of us pressed on. The Russian vans, like Kombis on steroids, took the roads uncomplainingly thanks to the expertise of the drivers. Puntsag led the convoy as the oldest driver with the cheerful Jigmee and Bayaraa following. Bayaraa, who wore his patchwork bucket hat at a rakish angle and had a fondness for gangster rap and, inexplicably, Wham. Even in my wildest imaginings, I had never thought to factor George Michael into my Mongolian experience but there was something cheerful about bumping through the countryside with Last Christmas blaring.

The tourist camp in the desert had a block of coveted showers that were little more than trickles of warm water but after two days in the dust and heat of the Gobi, they appeared as the most decadent of luxuries. It was the last running water we would see for several days. We drove on to the Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park where the vans dropped us at one end of the valley and drove off to meet us again at the other end. We tramped 10km through stunning scenery, following a small stream and keeping an eye out for exciting wild animals like wolves or Gobi bears. The best we managed was a wild goat so far up a cliff it was more like a moving dot than an animal. Mongolians sold hand-carved souvenirs at a few spots throughout the park. The Belgian fellow and his wife, both in matching head to toe khaki outfits, stopped to look at the items and asked Khishgee to translate. "Don't tell me tourist prices!" bellowed the Belgian in his thick European accent. "I am not a tourist!"

Camping in the national park where the world is your toilet is fine, unless you happen to have raging food poisoning. I've never seen the Bob move so fast as when he dived across me and half out of the tent to demonstrate his digestive pyrotechnics. It left him out of action for a couple of days, which meant he missed the camel ride. Mongolia boasts the rarer two-humped camels which are shorter and fluffier than their mono-humped counterparts. When camels don't have enough body fat, their humps go floppy and if there's anything more comical than a camel, it's one that looks like a month-old party balloon. I was delighted to be paired with a solid humped fellow whom I nicknamed George. George was a prince among dromedaries. Seated comfortably between his two humps, I managed to encourage him into an awkward, rollicking trot towards the end of the ride. Once he was comfortably seated back at the gers, I even risked a pat. Although he didn't encourage my affections, he didn't spit on me either which I took as a sign of camaraderie.

Our last stop in the desert proper was at Bayanzag or the Flaming Cliffs, so named for the rich red and orange landscape which almost glows in the sun. It's the site of many of Mongolia's amazing dinosaur finds and we trekked through the barren landscape to be collected by the vans. The Belgians were intent on finding some kind of fossil despite the area having been extensively excavated and took twice as long as everyone else to get to the meeting point while the rest of us sweated under the desert sun. On the way out of the area the drivers stopped to show everyone what they said was a dinosaur claw still embedded in rock. The Belgian fellow immediately began trying to smash it out of the landscape to the horror of his fellow tourists and after a reasonable amount of outcry, left it alone and got back in the van.

And so, gentle readers, began the long trek north to the land where the yaks roam free...

Tradition, Modernity and the Great Bustard: Mongolia Part One

Mongolia: A Traveler’s Handbook, by Battulga Tumurdash, contains a piece of unarguable wisdom: “Saying Mongolia’s roads are in very poor condition is somewhat misleading, because the drive to many destination [sic] will involve no road what so ever.”

It’s a truth that rattles the bones of travelers traversing the country in any kind of vehicle and a joy we had yet to discover when we arrived in the capital Ulaan Bataar late on a Thursday night to find a tour representative holding a card with our names on it.

When attempting to leave the airport parking lot, we encountered the first and only Mongolian road rule: there are no rules. People park wherever they can find a space and the exit to the carpark was blocked by an assortment of vehicles. Our driver managed to find another gap and squeeze his van through it with some impressive manoevring before bumping off towards the city. Despite our advance booking, the hotel staff seemed confused by our presence and rang our room repeatedly in the next two days, asking, “When are you closet?” which we took to mean, “When are you leaving?” We later discovered most of our fellow tour members had similar experiences and several rooms had no hot water so despite being regarded with constant suspicion, we got off lightly.

Two free days was enough time to get a decent look at Ulaan Bataar, that cheerful jumble of shiny glass high-rises, concrete communist boxes and crumbling brightly painted facades. Modernity has arrived with a vengeance in the form of giant department stores filled with international fashion labels. The city people are well dressed and the women negotiate incomplete pavements with gaping open manholes in improbably high heels. There was even an enormous Twilight poster covered in Cyrillic script proving that a country where yaks roam the street unimpeded still isn’t immune to terrible pop culture.

The Natural History Museum is a haven of the unintentionally comical. Along with housing an astonishing collection of dinosaur bones and fossils, there’s a bird whose name has been translated into English as the Great Bustard and a small deer with an unlikely pair of giant fangs. Killer Bambi looked more like a taxidermist’s prank than a bloodthirsty killer roaming the steppes but the biggest laugh came from the inflated blowfish which sported a pair of plastic googly eyes usually found on cheap toys. On closer inspection of the other sea creatures, it appeared the taxidermist in charge of the fish display had done a quick run down to Geoff’s Emporium to accessorize his creations. The National History Museum and Zanabazar Fine Arts Museum provided more appropriate and sedate displays but in all three establishments the staff followed us discreetly, as if they expected us to rip open a cabinet and make off with a giant golden Buddha the moment they turned their backs. Considering we were occasionally the only visitors in the room, it was a little unnerving.

Perhaps the wariness is a result of Mongolia’s lack of experience with tourists, something which is refreshing for travelers who can walk down the street unimpeded by toothless children trying to sell them bookmarks or postcards. The only places we were asked for money were at attractions like the central city’s Sukhbaatar Square, which borders Parliament House, the Gandan Monastery and Bogd Khaan’s Winter Palace. Even then, it was more polite inquiry than the kind of hassling common in other tourist cities. The monastery, Mongolia’s largest, features a 26-metre-tall golden Buddhist Migid Janraisag statue and a range of different temples. We ducked quietly through doorways to discover colourful wall hangings, Tibetan pray wheels and a monk in maroon robes chatting away on a cellphone in one corner. The palace has a kind of shabby genteel look with overgrown lawns and uneven floors. It houses the beautifully preserved art, belongings and furniture of Mongolia’s last king, Javzan Damba Hutagt VIII.

Ulaan Bataar is an easy city to navigate even for those who don’t speak Mongolian and the locals still look at tourists as people rather than dollar signs. Sure, western culture may have a toehold and it’s probably only a matter of time before Mongolia works out how to harvest the tourist dollar. There’s Tommy Hilfiger nestled alongside tacky souvenir shops, but refreshingly, there’s still no McDonald’s.