Sidestory: the Mongolian diet consists largely of sheep's milk and mutton (nope, no Mongolian BBQ. I asked). After partaking of a community feast of various milk products and roast mutton washed down with sheep's milk vodka, my stomach was wasak. Instructed by our hosts to just find suitably bushy vegetation as cover, I walked a few hundred meters away from the village to find my very own piece of MOngolia. Away from the village, and while in a reflective mood while doing the deed, the full immensity of Mongolia's raw and desolate beauty suddenly struck me. The landscape I was looking at could very well look the same as during Genghis' Khan's empire, timeless and vast and unchanged. Squatting behind a bush, and surveying the landscape, an image suddenly flashed in my head, of Zhang Ziyi suddenly arriving in the horizon, complete with trailing garments and dustcloud ala Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Needless to say, it was my best ebak experience EVER. And I've had quite a few memorable ones.
This image remained with me since then. Last night, I chanced upon a Nat Geo feature on Zhang Ziyi's own experience in Mongolia. Her impressions of Mongolia's echoed my own. The experience had come full circle!
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