We had out two day retreat this week with five other couples.  This was our first day which even though it rained did not dampened our spirits or ruin our experience.

We are entering the park where at one time 300 monks lived.

This is one of 24 brass cooking pots that still exist in Mongolia.  This one is the largest.  It could cook 10 sheep at a time to feed all those monks that lived here.  You can see the ancient Mongolian script on this side. 

To give you an idea of just how large it is, I am standing beside it looking down into it.

 This is the museum that tells a little about the 300 monks and what their housing had looked like.  They also had displays of the wildlife of the area and the above picture is made if wood shavings and tiny pieces of bark.

Jack(our name for him) was our tour guide.  He is telling us about the 300 Buddhist monks that had lived in this valley until the Russians took over and killed 241 of them. Jack served his mission in Texas several years ago.

The brown horizontal lines in this picture are actually the rocks that made of the foundation of the monks dwellings.  They were made of wood and they were all burnt down when the monks were killed and the temples destroyed.

 This is one of the temples that was rebuilt on one of the original sites.  The statue is the White Woman god.  There is also a Green Woman god.

This is what is left of the main temple.  It was built of bricks that the monks made themselves.  It seems that most of their temples were built up on hillsides.

And this is the view of the valley that the monks had looked at everyday from their temples and dwellings.  We ate our lunch at this park in our vehicles because it was raining again.

Then we went to Hustai national park.  It is the sanctuary for the Mongolian wild horse.

 This is the ger we stayed in for the night.  It was really quite nice and cozy even though it was still raining off and on outside 

This was some of the wild horses we saw.  The small colt in the second pic is only 4 days old.  At one time this horse became extinct in Mongolia, but they brought back some of the ones that they had lent out to other zoos and now they have 258 horses in this park.  These horses are a light sandy color and their legs are dark but also have zebra-like stripes on them.   The colts are white when born.  Wolves kill many colts each year but since the wolf is protected here they cannot kill the wolves to save the horses.  They just provided the area for them to live but let nature take its course.

We ended the day with an traditional Mongolian folk concert.  This trio usually has 5 members but one had illness in the family and the other just got married.  These three played the horsehead fiddles and did throat singing.  They make noises from deep in their throat that sounds like another instrument playing.  It was a very enjoyable evening.  This group is named Domog and they have performed in many other countries including the winter Olympics in Canada.  It was a wonderful and full day and we slept well in our ger!!