Todays programme our “Review Day”. We started the day early so that the all the reviews could be completed in time for lunch. Everyone boarded the coaches (yes, that is coaches parked in the middle of a field 4 miles from the nearest road). Our first stop was the Temple Restoration project. On arrival, a number of the groups were both surprised and pleased with the progress made since the day they worked on the temple. We were less so, due to the fact we were the last group working on it. We all gathered together outside the temple and were graciously thanked by the head Lama, with a little help from our translator. We were then invited into the temple where we presented a sizeable donation to the temple for the remainder of the restoration work, and the monks performed a ritual of thanks with much chanting.
After leaving the temple, we headed out to visit the Nomad families once again for everyone to say good bye. It was good to see them again, and to say a proper good bye, but no-one was really sure why we needed to descend on the families on mass at all.
Once we had finished at the Nomads, we moved on to Ulaanbaatar to the Scout Centre Project. On route, one of the coaches had a blow out and had to wait for another coach to pick them up, so only about half of us were at the Scout Centre for the review. The head of Mongolian Scouting thanked us for the hard work we had put in, and we presented them with a plaque to commemorate one of the Three Nations participants who died in a mountaineering accident last year.
From the Scout Centre we went to lunch at a Mongolian Grill place (much like the Mongolian restaurant in Taffs Well, but on a much bigger scale) where we met the rest of the group.
The afternoon was free to do what we liked, so we wandered around UB for a bit and visited the Black Market again before meeting up with the rest of the group for our last dinner in Mongolia.