WOW! What a day!

Yesterday was an incredible, wonderful, amazing day. We did & saw so much that it will probably take several posts before I tell the whole story. The park is 347 square miles of wildlife preserve, situated in a valley bordered by mountains and the Tuul river. We saw gazelles, red deer, Altai sheep, vultures, magpies, domestic Mongolian horses and the Takhi. Zachnaa, the manager of the UB office of the International Takhi Group that Jasmin works for, took us to the park and drove us around. A quick word about Zachnaa: he is multilingual and a very friendly man. He had to learn Russian in school, lived in Germany for 2 years in connection with his job with ITG, and speaks English, as well as Mongolian, of course. The park is beautifully preserved - there are no paved roads, and of course, no hunting is allowed, so the animals live as naturally as possible within its borders. The animals are not spoiled by human contact, nor are they obviously scared of us, so it was easy to get somewhat close to them, but if you come too close for their comfort, they flee.
Because there are no fences or barriers to the park, domestic herds sometimes stray into the area, especially because there is such good grazing there. So, in addition to the list of park residents above, we also saw domestic sheep and goats.
We were fortunate enough to be able to meet the director of the park, Bandi, who spoke to us at length. I asked him what his goals for the park were and he mentioned several, including ecotourism and continued cooperation with the neighboring herders. They are doing a lot to win the support of the people in the community, including educating them about traditional crafts they can develop for sale (felting is big here) and showing them how to plant potatoes and other vegetables. I asked him if the people collected the manure for use on their gardens, but neither he nor Zachnaa knew the word. I looked to Jasmin for help in explaining it, ran through a couple of synonyms in my head - quickly discarding "excrement" and "poo" - and the only word I could come up with was "scheiss", which luckily everyone understood. Naughty words get the message across when traditional learning fails!