Before we arrived in Mongolia we didn’t even know what Naadam was. A lot of tourists come here especially for Naadam, but we were just lucky to arrive unwittingly for the big event.

From what we understand Naadam is Mongolia’s national holiday. All over the country tournaments in the three national sports take place – wrestling, horse riding and archery. The winners of the regional games then go to Ulaan Baator for the big finals. We managed to coincide our visit to the Naadam festivities in Sansar, Bulgan province (about 500km west of Ulaan Baator) with a trek that involved staying with nomadic families in their gers.

We stayed with Mr Bambatogtoh’s family for two nights and on the second day they took us to the Naadam festival in Sansar. Also staying with the Byambatogtoh family were Julie and Jerome from Switzerland so we went to the Sansar Nadaam with them, and ended up hanging out with the governor of the province no less!

On the third night we stayed with Otgon, his wife Delgersaihan and their children Udval and Renchinochir. They took us to an amazing sand dune on an ox-drawn cart.

For our final two nights we stayed with the Idertsogt family. Mr Idertsogt lives with his wife, children and his seventy-seven year old mother, who still works really hard from morning ’till night.

We had an amazing time and have gained a small amount of insight into how nomadic families live in Mongolia. The families that we stayed with weren’t even all that remote. We were surprised to see that they had mobile phones, solar panels and the odd satellite dish and we always knew that there was a road (of sorts) somewhere not too far away. Even with these modern additions to the ger, the families seemed pretty remote by our standards – but I think these families were pretty well “connected” compared to many others.

One difficult thing about the week was the food (the other was not washing as there’s no running water at the gers). We’re just not used to the food they eat. They have a drink which they love called airag – fermented horse milk. Luckily we just had to drink a little to be polite and it’s a drink for special occasions so we didn’t get loads of it. A staple drink is milk tea – salty, very milky tea.

For food we ate variations of mutton, potato, noodles and salt. I think one of the days we had some offal too but I try not to think about that. They seem to eat every bit of the animal. We had no fruit or other vegetables all week.

We’re back in Ulaan Baator now and have just been to a veggie restaurant to stock up on our vitamins. We’re doing fine but it might be a while though before I eat meat again.