13 day mega trip part 1
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008Space is likely to be the thing I most remember about our 13 day Gobi trip. Lots of flat, open space. While beautiful not altogether helpful if your a female trying to find a toilet spot.
Through our guest house we had arranged a van and a driver to take us for 13 days through the Gobi desert in lower Mongolia then up through central Mongolia before heading back to UB. We had meet an American couple, Stuart and Tina, who would split the cost and join us for our very long drive. For the first 9 days we were also joined by another van load from the guesthouse who were doing basically the same trip but not the last part of ours. The green van had Miriam and Rick from Holland, Stephan from Belgium and a Korean guy who we never really learned his name. So after just managing to get our visas into the embassy to get a Chinese visa and getting our train tickets for the day after we arrived back we load up our vans with 13 days worth of supplies and headed out into the wilderness.
I am not sure how to convey everything that happened over the 13 days into a blog post but I will try and maybe write 2. Our driver was Gana, a tough Mongolian guy who looked like he could fix anything. He also giggled constantly like a little girl. His entire english vocabulary centered around the word ‘good’, and a few others: van, Gobi, sleep, Ger, lunch. Most of our conversations went something like this.
“Lunch?”
“Lunch? Good now lunch?”
“Yep, lunch good”
And for looking like he could fix anything, well he could, really he managed to drive that van over anything, through anything and every day get it going again, He could light us fires, find us shops and even brought us biscuits along the way which became somewhat addictive. As we discovered in Mongolia, men are real men. No challenge was too great for Gana, whether it was reattaching the steering wheel after it feel off (while driving), rebuilding the entire gear box, navigating through snowstorms (which is difficult) and digging us out of icy roads. Awesome.
So our first few days were spent driving into the Gobi, which appeared after about fifteen minuted of leaving UB which is essentially the only main city in the country and pretty much has the only paved roads. We did come across paved roads about 9 days later but they quickly disappear into dirt tracks. Mongolia is the least populated country in the world so it doesn’t take long to get out of the city. The first few days were just huge wide open spaces, which was incredibly beautiful, our two matching Russian vans raced each other across wide fields, occasionally we came across herds of camels or horses. Looking through photos in our Lonely Planet was exactly the same as our views. You don’t need to be a professional photographer to take amazing landscape shots in this country. We passed gers, guys speeding across on motorbikes or riding horses rounding up sheep. Sun sets were incredible, the sky was always blue. It was awesome.
Every night we stayed in ‘Gers’ which are the traditional Mongolian tents. Most of the country are still nomadic and all live in these gers which are spread out through the country side. Each van load got our own Ger and the family would bring us in food and hot water and get the fire going for the night. While the fire was going they got hot but around 2 am once it had burned out it was cold, Very very cold. Part of the reason seems to be the fires aren’t really designed well enough to hold the heat, no chimney blocker to burn it more slow and given the lack of trees (as in none) there is no wood so you burn dried poo…..always a hilarious joke and taking turns going poo collecting. Every so often we would do an activity of sorts, like wander through an ice canyon (without the ice, but still nice), or check out some dinosaur excavation sights where they have found hundreds of dinosaur bones preserved in the Gobi.
The food wasn’t too bad. I had prepared myself for the worst, as from what I had heard food doesn’t get much better than mutton and mutton. We cooked our own lunch then got dinner which varied from mutton with noodles to mutton with rice or pasta, but mutton was easy to pick out and I was pretty much able to eat every night. I did have a bit of back up food for the few nights where there was just too much meat to handle. There was this strange taste to everything which quickly became the ‘Mongolian taste’, they have this weird hard cheese tastes like it, plus all the meat, sometimes the water and every house seems to smell like it. Kind of weird. But not as bad as expected. Rdoc seems to have had a bad reaction to something though as one day he got ridiculously sick and spent the whole night expelling everything from his body while totally spacing out. Luckily he recovered and pushed on through with the journey.
We did stop in a couple of towns along the way which are just dirt road small dusty towns with lots of Gers behind big fences, nothing too special and the open country side was much nicer, although the town gers were always a bit nicer inside with more blankets, better fires, closer toilets (always the outside hole in the ground variety) and electricity which kept our ipods charged to avoid listening to too much Mongolian music which our driver loved.
One night we spent at these massive sand dunes which stretch out in a long thin line across the Gobi, we road camels over too them in two groups, myself being in the second group, they left us on the dunes while the others rode the camels back to our site.
The dunes were beautiful but pretty soon it began to snow and it got cold. It was amazing watching the snow pile up on the dunes but an hour later when the camels never returned to pick us up we got a little worried. Luckily from the distance our van was bouncing over to rescue us, while it seems they just forgot to come back and get us. This is Mongolia and things work differently.
The next morning we awoke to a full on snow storm. The white gers blended in with the white sky and the white flat ground. We loaded up the vans and the drove in circles for 2 hours while the drivers tried to find the road (or track). Really it is amazing how we ever made it out of there as really all there was was white around us, no landmarks, we had no compass or anything but some how our drivers got us out of there, straight into a mountain pass where we spent about 5 hours digging and pushing ourselves out of snow banks and skidding across icy hills.
By the end it was a bit worrying and stressful and we were all glad we made it out alive. I did start to think how long we could survive in the van with no heater….but of course the drivers are super amazing and we got out. Of course we still had another 5 hours of driving to go in the dark to our next camp site. We were all tired and over it, especially our driver Gana, by the time we arrived at our campsite 13 hours later. A huge day that had totally stuffed the vans but had brought us out of the Gobi and into central Mongolia.
admin