At Kharkhorin, all that can now be seen of the city that was, briefly, the capital of Mongolia is a monastery complex and some stone turtles. The wind blew hard and the prayer flags flew upwards, arching towards the sky. Inside a ger three little boy monks chanted while another monk performed a ceremony for a couple.

I tried as unobtrusively as possible to join a tour group as the guide explained some of the statues and things in the temples (I know NOTHING about Buddhism I realise). Like the story of the only female dharmapala who killed and ate her son who was turning evil like his father, and now keeps her good son in a bag; she was chewing on her son and her horse was riding on his flayed skin – quite terrifying.

The owner of my Guesthouse arranged for me to go on a six day trip to see a waterfall and to ride to the Eight Lakes, guided by his uncle, a nomad herder, and staying with nomadic families. A very ordinary tourist activity, but no evidence of signs to accommodate tourism. Shar, my guide, knew about four words of English, and otherwise we communicated by gesture. He, along with everyone else I met on the way, wore  the traditional del – a long coat which fastens diagonally from the neck, with a colorful piece of cloth tied around the waist. He was 55 but looked about 70. The first morning we sat in his ger eating yak yoghurt and waited for him to cut up all his cigarette papers, and then we set off.

The horses did not like being tied up, and the luggage horse was particularly disgruntled at being made to carry my backpack, and he kicked and reared and neighed. But Mongolians start riding pretty much from birth, and Shar was able to control the horses effortlessly, just making a few noises and turning the horse around – it was extraordinary to watch. I didn’t have the chance to practice riding beforehand since Shar hadn’t managed to catch the horses in time, but I’d been told the only word was ‘chu’ – go. But no matter how many times or ways or pitches or volumes I said it, my horse wouldn’t budge faster than a crawl, so I spent the first day being pulled along like the incompetent tourist I was. Later, I picked up some of the nuances – choh, chhhu, cha. (Later on the return drive, I heard our driver willing the car to ‘chu’ up a steep hill). As we rode, Shar would play music on his phone, or he would sing or whistle, always the same slow, high-pitched, meandering Mongolian songs.

Now is the high time for moving down to the summer camp, and we saw yaks loaded with gers and their furniture. It takes about an hour to set up the summer ger. The families I stayed with and their gers were traditional, and remarkably similar. Most of the children were away at school so it was just the older ones and a few babies and toddlers. Some of the gers had wooden floors while others were built directly onto the earth, with grass coming up the sides of the plastic floor, and the holes would be sellotaped up in the evenings. There would be a shrine at the back, next to which would be a little TV and a phone tied to the ceiling.

When we arrived (no knocking, you just walk in and sit down), we were given bowls of salty milk tea, and a big bowl of yak cream, which was like an enormous plate of clotted cream an inch thick. You would have a teaspoon of it and pass it to your neighbour. They would then cook you a meal which would begin by getting out a dark brown shrivelled lump like a rotten carrot – dried yak – and hammering it on a stone; this was then soaked or boiled. There were only two meals: yak with rice or yak with noodles. The noodles would have to be made each meal time by kneading the dough, rolling it out, drying it on the fire and then cutting it up. There was never a table – it was all done on one of the beds.

On one occasion the family killed a sheep, and we were given a large basin filled with entrails and an enormous knife and dagger. Shar cut it up and passed me the warm (thankfully cooked) pieces to eat for what felt like a (not altogether unpleasant) age. I could only recognise the intestines and the heart, maybe the liver as well.

There were large plastic barrels which I at first took to be holding water, but were in fact full of yak yoghurt. This ranged from the wonderfully mild to the almost fizzy. Never, ever, was there a vegetable or piece of fruit. I was completely stuffed the entire time as they always filled me a bowl that was twice as big as anyone else’s. Food took up a lot of time in the day.

Nowhere  in any of my preparatory reading did anyone mention that airag, the fermented mare’s milk for which I had specially come to Mongolia, is not made all year round. It is too cold at the moment, and all the animals are at their weakest. But I was more than happy with the yak milk. In the evening we would sit and watch the animals or watch TV. It’s a quiet life (at the moment), and every day was pretty much the same. I felt quite embarrassed to be sitting there watching them as though I had come to a zoo. I didn’t want to snap away at them, so most of my photos are of yaks and goats. But I was relieved that I had gone on my own when I saw the way some other tourists behaved on a later occasion.

On the final day of riding we had to take a mother and baby yak to another valley. Whenever we passed a herd of yaks they would rush over, and Shar would canter off with his stick shouting ‘hoch’ (I never saw anyone gallop – perhaps because it’s the weak time of year), and I, having no control over my horse, would follow through bushes and trees, jumping over rocks. It was very funny and sweet, and by the end we just had to walk at a tired baby yak speed.

Returning to Ulaanbaatar was dirty and unpleasant. I wanted to be back in the open, trotting across the steppe, eating dried yak and yoghurt, watching the stars from my bed as the saddles glowed in the firelight.

Most of Mongolia has no railway, so the only way to Ulaanbaatar, or anywhere, was by bus. I was told the journey would take two or three days, depending on how many times the bus broke down. Astonishingly, we didn’t break down once, and it took just under 48 hours.

The bus looked tough. At the back seats were covered in junk, while some of the seats in the front were now just metal frames. Most of the luggage was sellotaped cardboard boxes, and everything had to go under your seat, on your lap, or in the aisle, meaning getting on and off the bus became an obstacle course. The windows were clean enough to look out through, and were lined with filthy, threadbare pink tassled curtains.

We drove through mountains, past huge frozen rivers, enormous eagles sitting on the side of the road. The bus would randomly stop in the road (what road? more like a sandy track) for toilet breaks, and everyone would rush off, the women trying halfheartedly to find a mound of earth for some privacy.

We stopped off at a cafe in the middle of nowhere (everywhere looks like the middle of nowhere though). I’d eaten so much Kazakh food I had no wish for any more, but I was summoned inside. Through a door padded thickly with a worn embroidery was a room with low beds, stools and tables around which everyone ate together. I was given more buuz.

The landscape became flatter and dryer as we looped south to the Gobi desert (not of the sand dune variety). To my enormous excitement, and the whole bus’s I think, we saw lots of camels – proper two humped camels with lots and lots of dark velvety hair, and they looked surprisingly elegant. But the Gobi was so full of puddles and mud that looking through the windows became more and more difficult. So sadly this is only photo I got of the camels.

We stopped off at a Ger camp for lunch, and everyone disappeared into an unmarked Ger without me seeing which one they had entered. When I plucked up the courage to walk in to one, they were all sitting on low stools again, drinking milky tea.

The nights were bleak and extremely cold. I could feel the wheels struggling against the sand, and the stones that flew up made it sound like it was raining. But the daylight hours were quite entertaining. A game of cards was played in the aisle on a pile of boxes, with much triumphant flourishing of hands and collecting of money. We arrived in Ulaanbaatar very dirty and smelly, but in pretty good shape.

I’d found a WOOFing place just outside the city in one of the ger suburbs. But since nothing really grows in Mongolia, there wasn’t much I could do. The host is a young woman who started off trading second hand cars and false jewellery, then got into property development and now rents out an apartment to tourists, and was off to Hong Kong to learn how to invest better. Her tourists were away for the night so she let me sleep and wash in the luxury apartment, on the condition that I’d never been there… I indulged myself with a bath and a supper of horse rib.

Ulaanbaatar is concrete and dirty, and seems unusual for not having a single pretty street. There are however a few old temples which survived communism. At the Ghandan Khiid monastery, there was a very jolly scene as students seemed to be celebrating their graduation. But I longed to return to the steppe.