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- Day 1
- Wednesday, July 31, 2024 at 8:00 PM
- ⛅ 26 °C
- Altitude: 374 m
FrancePort Ripaille46°24’11” N 6°30’20” E
Day 1 to 5 - Tank up w/ family & fun

Kids left some days ago to Grand-Papa's home in France, and now is time for Ian and myself to finish packing up, close our house, bring the turtles to their holiday home, hand over a set of keys to our new house watcher and join them to tank up on some family time and water fun before the real departure. 😀 😅
Paddle/ pedalo race, tennis, triathlon training, dives, fishing, water skiing, etc. So much fun for the kids there ... while I finish up admin, homeschooling preps, and packing!!!
Kids also manage to find a few jobs to replenish their travel budget there, selling their magazine 'la fourmi', bake sale by the club house, empty Grand Pa's garage, revamp some old chairs, etc. Oscar and Nora Skye are particularly motivated!Read more
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- Day 5
- Sunday, August 4, 2024 at 5:04 PM
- ☁️ 27 °C
- Altitude: 431 m
SwitzerlandGVA-Cornavin Train Station46°13’49” N 6°6’24” E
Day 5 - And... off we go!!!!

Crazy how I shrunk. Or should I rather say, how much the kids have grown in 2 years!!! Last time, I left with 4 kiddos. This time, it feels more like one kiddo and... 3 teens and pre-teens! One has already outgrown me by a long way, the second is on the verge of doing so (under heated family debate at the moment 🤣). I think this trip will be quite a different experience!!! 🤞
Thonon to Geneva airport, and off to Turkey for a pit-stop! Lots of transportation modes later for such a short first leg, and a few panicks already (you wouldn't think the four of us have already gone round the world and in 32 countries together before!), we make it to our airport hotel.
The hotel surroundings have nothing of the charm of the center of Istanbul, quite the opposite. We're in a giraffe looking hotel, in the middle of nowhere, waiting for more giraffes to grow next to her. Close to the new airport, there is nothing but a few of those hotels dropped out of nowhere, and a few restaurant-tourist-traps with shish kebabs more expensive than at the center of Geneva. We eventually find a small, poorly lit one which offers more reasonable prices with only one dish available, and no tourists, nut locals waiting for customers. They do offer us a pack of biscuits as we are leaving. Sheer kindness again, less of a tourist-trap mind? Very sweet anyways!
But the call to prayer, the koftas and a pit stop at the supermarket to shop for breakfast still reminds us of the flavours of our previous travel and our wonderful time with Grand Papa and Cololo!Read more
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- Day 6
- Monday, August 5, 2024 at 2:40 AM
- 🌙 23 °C
- Altitude: 133 m
TurkeyIstanbul Airport41°15’40” N 28°44’33” E
Day 5 - Istanbul to Ulan Batar!!!

Silly breakfast on bed with a phenomenal mix of spices, delicious tomatoes and mini-cucumbers, a Turkish version of fresh feta cheese (about 30% of what the shop was selling, all at tiny prices - 50c for a big piece!) and local nutella. Delish!
Checking is seamless, with the nicest check-in perso. I have EVER encountered! He even offered sweets to the kids and advice on excellent hikes in Turkey! Just amazingly sweet guy! 🫠 (in total opposition with the ones at the gate in Geneva!). The more I travel, the more I feel Europe (and Australia) are past their sell-by date! Overly priced travel, rundown airports and far too often grumpy staff. In Asia, Africa and Latam, we have mostly encountered well functioning systems, beautiful airports (with as clean toilets as in Switzerland dixit one if the kids), rarely cancelled flights or strikes, wonderful service (with free meals, drinks and entertainment on flight of course), etc, etc, etc. Hum. Quite the opposite again to our experience leaving switzerland yesterday!!! Food for thought about our 'developed' world! 😤
Then over 7 hours of absolutely smooth flight we at last reach Ulan Batar! Woohooo! Everyone is very excited. Even Nora Skye who was a little nostalgic about leaving friends and comfort admits 'now it is absolutely ok'. Seems she has put her travel hat back on! Woohoo!
Past border control, baggage claim, taxi driver find, 30 min into the city in pouring rain and thunder, and some good laughs, we are at last off to bed at... 5am. We have an apartment this time. Lovely to be back here! Sweet dreams!Read more
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- Day 7
- Tuesday, August 6, 2024 at 8:16 PM
- ⛅ 21 °C
- Altitude: 1,301 m
MongoliaState Circus47°55’8” N 106°54’43” E
Day 6 - Ulan Bataar 🥰

First day is a little tough for everyone. Kids get up at around 1130. After more than an hour at the bank to withdraw enough Tugrik and Dollars to last us the next two weeks, we have a rather good lunch of Asian sort-of-fusion where we can choose from Korean, Japanese and Mongolian. Extremely surprisingly for us, the MOST expensive food is the mongol Mutton!!??!! For the ones who know us well, the ONLY food we got tired of during our previous world tour was... Mongolian mutton! Since outside Oulan Bataar, off the beaten paths, mutton noodle soup is just about the only thing you can get, and since mutton is generally genuine old (unchewable) chewy mutton, (or horse meat during winter since mutton gets too chewy even for Mongolians) as opposed to delicious lamb as we know it, we are truly baffled that this is considered the delicacy in town! The Mongolian mutton dishes are double the price of any other dish on the menu!?!?🤣🤣🤣🤣
Ian clearly is tired. Grumpy about the tasty food (he wanted yogurth at 2pm rather than delicious mutton 😅) he manages to fall asleep at the restaurant. Then again back at the house while the kids are overly enthusiastic about doing homework. -I was planning on taking it easy too on the first day 😶🌫️-
Later we go for a walk around town, bump into the 'back to school' supplies market. A quaint set of stands with a gigantic quantity of dirt cheap school supplies, but without the one thing we were looking for, A4 sized paper with lines or squares. They only have heaps of small A5 and super thin notebooks which we settle for. The exact same super fancy flexible rulers we normally get in Migros in Geneva is 25 cents here!
We try to fix Lennox's brand new glasses in a hard to find shop. As often in Mongolia, it is difficult to know where shops are since historically during Russian Communist era, there were far fewer shops. So perhaps these are former houses without window fronts, so they are hidden! Thank you Lola, who as always finds it in a whiff of an instant. And the boss speaks perfect German and tells us he has studied and lived/worked for 30 years at the most prestigious shop in Germany! But to no avail. No fix for the glasses! One down, on the first day 🫣 But as if to smoothen our pain (or because all our glasses are just too dirty?!) The guy kindly offers us all cloth wipes for our glasses and apologises profusely. Such kindness behind generally pretty serious Mongolian faces!!!
We go back to our favourite Korean restaurant. It is much more quiet (fallen out of fashion?) and after 1 hour waiting for our order, we are told that all the yummy dishes we got last time and have ordered long ago are not available. Strange! Seems things go in and out of fashion in a flash! The huge supermarket we went to last time to buy our breakfast has also vanished. Go figure...
And last but not least, we enter a house... shop again! Strange mix of run-down passages and the like. A bit of a maze where we are not sure whether we are entering and going through someone's house or a shop. But the sales lady is very enthusiastic and seems totally unaware of the tensions between Europeans and Russians when she announces enthusiastically and with a friendly smile after we tell her we are European that she is Russian!
The rest if the night is the usual chaos, with kids waking up at two. I'll spare you the details!!! 😅😤🥱Read more
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- Day 9
- Thursday, August 8, 2024 at 1:36 PM
- ☁️ 30 °C
- Altitude: 1,329 m
MongoliaTsogt-Ovoo44°7’47” N 105°3’42” E
Day 7 - Nomadic Life

Today we head off towards Tsagaan Suvarga where we'll be staying with a nomadic family, the Dashdorov. We are slowly getting back in the groove of our own nomadic life, but not quite yet. I can feel everyone is still quite exhausted, especially after Oscars' 2am ballet dance where he woke everyone up thanks to jetlag 🤪
We start our journey with a lovely driver, far far more smiley than the previous one! One quite odd thing about Mongols here. They tend not to smile at all, or are really generous with their smiles. Our previous driver only once faintly smiled for the last photo we took with him. He was otherwise particularly grumpy, unless he was teasing and joking with Oscar. This one, is smiling from the get-go. But what I see most often, is that they are pretty serious, and warm up to smiling only quite a bit later, once we've managed to have a couple of laughs. Then the smiles don't stop.
Anyhow, our driver, in his normal job, is a construction worker, has 4 kids but with a very wide spread in age. He proudly shows us his house, in one of those huge towers along the road. He also speaks no English. Google translate will have to do, even if in our first attempt, he tells me the came fell down. We all have a good laugh, him included, once he gets how bad the translation is!
We stop at a big westernized supermarket to stack up on some essentials (ramen noodles for survival moments where food won't be available, and for a change from..mutton!) Interestingly we meet a local lady who speaks some German and French, and who studies nomadic life.
Ready for 10 days of nomadic life hopping and 2000kms of off road driving! Woohoo.
All is green around us! Totally different from from our last experience which was as dry as it gets!
First thing we pass is a Milk farm of ... horses!!!
The drive is smooth. Stop for food, I ask the driver to order for me what he thinks is best. Guess what he gets me? Mutton soup with noodles 🤣 Nora Skye struggles 🤪
We get to our first night stop. There is absolutely mad wind. I can also see that the prospect of the rough life is tough on all of us. Lennox lands the worse bed this time. A blanked on wood. Some of us get what we think is a thick mattress, but... it is a wood frame with a thin frame on top! Hahaha! 🧐 But Lola kindly offers her brother her own bed. 😲
We go see the camels, walk around for a while, Oscar starts seeing heaps of bugs which he tries to find in his book, as well as incredibly cute lizards, and I can feel everyone starts to loosening up. Strange. The mood lifts, and the magic of mongolia starts taking us by the hand again. Food is what it is, mutton and starch. But little plus, I ask whether we can try camel milk and yogurth. To my greatest surprise, it is for once LENNOX who seems to hear the taste the best! Really not bad, even though it tastes like it has turned. I do finish it happily (better than mutton!). What is tougher on the palate, I must admit, is the milk that they go fetch for me. I struggle to swallow, but to be polite I do finish half my bowl. Lennox seems also able to handle it!!!!! The others, absolutely... not! It tastes really rancid, a bit gewy, and with bits. And still warm from the Camel🥵🥶🤯 I am still wondering whether my stomach will manage to survive this one intact 😅
But as a reward for the tough experience as we warm up to the family, they offer our kids to go for a camel ride. We never tire of those! Good fun!!!
The night is magical, noise of wind and howling... camels (they do sound like wolves), then when the wind dies down, we can hear the bugs on the roof. (Or in the case of Ian, inside his ear, and which refuses to get out for a while!) What peace when we come out to go to the loo at 2am with Lola and enjoy the sheer silence and darkness of the night! SO magical! And a little extra, it is WARM!Read more