Sunday, October 07, 2007

Mountains, eagles, and more.

I've been in Olgii for the past two days to see the annual Golden Eagle festival that celebrates the eagle hunting tradition of the local Kazak population.

Before I get to that however lets continue where I left off with my last post. The fifth day of the trip was another full day's drive to Khovd. As usual the scenery varied almost minute by minute over the course of the day.



The next two days were spent driving over the mountains through the Tsambagarav Uul national park. We took it easy these two days and had plenty of time to take a few hikes around the place we stopped to camp the first night. This next batch of pictures covers both days.



Finally, here are some pictures of the eagle festival that I came to Olgii to see. The first day started out with an opening ceremony and parade downtown then moved out to the surrounding countryside for a series of competitions. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture (or movie) of the eagle that got distracted and buzzed me yesterday during one of the competitions. Quite an experience having a fully grown eagle fly straight at me with talons extended.



That's it for now. We leave Olgii tomorrow and I have no idea whether I'll have Internet access until I get back to UB. We're supposed to spend one more night here towards the end of this week so hopefully I'll have a chance to post then.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So which is scarier...getting chased by a baboon or buzzed by an eagle???

Sunday, October 07, 2007 9:32:00 PM  
Blogger Brian said...

Definately the baboon. The eagle was more exciting than scary. They are pretty tame and usually won't attack people. Sometimes they find a person's head to be a convenient perch though which can result in a trip to the hospital (now that would be scary here).

Friday, October 12, 2007 9:14:00 AM  

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All photographs copyright Brian A. Wilcox unless otherwise noted.

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