selenak

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm off to a three weeks journey through Mongolia. Only right at the start and at the end will I'll be staying at Ulaanbataar, the capital, at a hotel which could have online access, but in between it's countryside, yurts and camping all the way, and this means that in all likelihood, you won't be hearing from me until the 15th of July. Unless there will be sudden appearances of wireless lan in the Gobi desert, that is, and/or the Ulaanbataar hotel and its access proves too much of a temptation during the last day.

In any case, I will return armed with photos and hopefully tales, and would be grateful for links to any spectacular fanfiction or meta in my fandoms that gets posted during said three weeks. Maybe leave said links in comments to this entry? This would be great. I'm both looking immensely forward to the journey and a bit nervous (comes with not speaking any of the languages that are spoken there and having to rely on an interpreter), and have been careful not to mention to my mother that the bubonic plague still exists in some parts of Mongolia (not the ones I'll visit, though). :)

Back to suitcase packing I go...

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ratcreature

Wow, that sounds like a cool vacation. I look forward to the photos. And the plague has reservoir hosts in rodents in steppes all over, so it's not that unique to Mongolia, the US still has the plague in its rodents too. At least with plague you're probably fine as long as you don't get some marmot fleas, who don't seem that keen for humans to snack on based on the not so high number of plague cases, unlike mosquitoes with all their nasty diseases...

skywaterblue

Hey hey, hantavirus! (Have they ever proven that Y. pestis actually was the cause of The Plague, anyway?)

Yeah. For a while there were other theories, but they have dug out some dead from several plague cemeteries in Europe and isolated the genetic code of the bacteria, and it was Y. pestis.

Cool. Because hantavirus causes some awfully similar effects, and I never heard it got resolved. Thanks.

gelliaclodiana

That sounds amazing! Have a wonderful time. It's something I've always wanted to do.

Also, don't worry about the plague. Modern medicine means it probably won't kill you these days.