Route : A totally random grassland about 70km from Khovd, Mongolia >>> An even more random rocky spot at the edge of the Gobi desert, Mongolia
Approx Distance : 220km

The ashes from our campfire...a bit pimped up with a horse skull. Skeletons were all over the place throughout Mongolia...

Woke up, nice cold river water washing your face does wonders…we said our goodbyes to the french guys (they wanted to swim in the river with their rubber duck!)…Khovd shouldn’t be too far away and we can make it easily that day assuming the car holds up of course. We make good speed…roads seemed to get a bit better. I don’t know how we manage to do it every time…we always managed to camp just at the end of the bad (or in this case, worse) roads before the good ones start. And then we saw it…

Camels!! Mongolian double humped camels!! They looked awesomely cool…we stopped to take some pics with them. Those camels are so much more impressive than the dromedaries from the rest of the world. We then ran into the Swedish guys (filling up their tank from a jerry can)…they seemed to be fine…car also in surprisingly good order. They are one of the few teams we knew who drove just like that after buying the car a week before the launch. They informed us that Aya (the lone star chick who lost her car keys) had found a Toyota Landcruiser from Olgy to Ulaanbataar…for guess what…80$!! That’s a very good deal we thought…wow. Some chicks get all the luck…seriously.

This little shepherd chased us down on his horse...he was not too slow mind you compared to us on the mongolian roads...

Anyway, after the Swedish guys raced past holding a kitten (erm…as much as i hate to admit it, yes.), we reached Khovd! A whoop of joy and some aimless revving of the engine later, we spy a sign on the roadside…Western Mongolia Rally Camp it said…hmm…this looked a bit fishy. The Adventurists were actually trying to help us? In spite of their brilliant efforts in letting us know that we are on our own? Anyway, we went there (we spotted the symbol for a shower and beer too along with the rest!!)…met this Mongolian guy who called himself Raina…he was helpful…gave us direction for a fuel station, a mechanic and the city center. We didn’t hang around for too long there…had some tea…saw more of the kitten (which is totally adorable btw) and went straight to the mechanics. He welded the exhaust pipe back in place and jacked it up a bit until it fit the under-body of the car like a thong between a plump arse! It did keep making a funny rapping noise later on…we suspected friction…quite obviously…ahem. Anyway, we also fixed our flats, got some money, filled up the cars, visited the local market shortly (to exchange money and to fix Dink’s unbreakable shoes which broke), did some grocery shopping after being guided by a french backpacking couple and we were well on our way…

CAMELS! Mongolian CAMELS! Such a beautiful albeit dumb looking creature...the start of the Gobi??

We did have hope for just a moment…hope for tarmac…we did pay the 1500 Togrog before entering Khovd as part of the tarmac/road tax. We hope too much…no roads within a km of leaving town and the shaman stone hill. Hmm…ok…no problemo. We knew that the Gobi started after Khovd…it was true. But not quite like what i imagined…no sand dunes…no burning heat…it was a flattish and VERY VERY dry scrub-land. Ok, this is of course the northern edge of the Gobi. We saw many a camel from now on…those things somehow seem to dumb..the way they look at you with the open mouthed dribbling stare…yeah, but i guess you wont be playing the same tune if you are stuck a thousand miles from nowhere in the Gobi with a camel. One could survive with its milk, blood and of course, its wonderful strong padded desert prone feet. They were quite beautiful creature at the end of the day…we still didn’t see a camel rider though…many shepherds on horseback reared the camels…but no camel rider…yet…

We kept on…the roads…contrary to popular expectation (based on the 1500 Togrog tax) conformed to the more conventional wisdom of being back breakers, bone shakers and of course, nerve wrackers! The road was sandy in many places…which is the good part…it was hard to maintain a straight line at the speed at which we were attacking the road…we were in a sense “snowboarding” (or maybe sand boarding) along…imagine a snowboard riding on both its edges gently alternating between the 2 edges…similarly, the car was losing its traction first on the left, then the right, nice and gentle slides away from the straight line…it was not alarming by any means…just a little bit unsettling until we got used to it i.e. Anyway, that’s the good part. The bad part which was for the most part, obviously, was the thousands of mini speed bumpish kinds mounds all across the road including the bit off the main road…we sometimes traversed a good 50 meters to either side of the main road in search of bits without those bumps but to no avail…hmmm…ok, might as well take it like men. We took it…as must have many other teams before us. Talking of teams, we spied a rally car way off the road surrounded by a small assortment of what looked like a couple of trucks with some equipment…hmmm…Kris and Dink went on to explore…we prudently stayed behind on the excuse of a road.

Thats the abandoned rally car...the water drillers were there too. We had a flat right then...grrrr!

It turns out that those guys were water miners…they are towing back to Khovd an abandoned rally car…ruptured fuel line and the end of the line for that team. Also one of the water miners has a big hole in his stomach…so they had to hurry back in any case….brrr! Anyway, Kris and Dink returned to the road…just in time to spot a very flat front left tire. Hmmm…great timing…we were standing around admiring the brownity for about 15 minutes without noticing this…anyway, onto work. We fixed it (looked like a very small bird went through the tire…judging by the furry thing sticking out of it…ok kidding, it was not a bird! OF COURSE NOT!), turned left on the fork towards Altai/Ulaanbaatar. We wouldn’t have gone a km when we saw 3 cars parked by the side…looks like they just finished fixing a flat…among them were people who were driving out of Olgy when we cracked our radiator…their car completely broke down somewhere and had to be towed by the other teams to Khovd. They did briefly try buying a motorbike…they almost sealed the deal when the motorbike had a flat…the deal went flat as well after that…and now they are hitching a ride with the 3 car convoy. Among the convoy was the British mother-daughter team who we heard about in Turkmenistan…cool. Anyway, we set off together now…and within another couple of kms, BAM! Another flat…hmmm…we went on anyway following the mother daughter team..they turned back much later for the guys…hehe.

Getting the tires and the exhaust pipe fixed at khovd

Now the sun was close to setting and we were much closer to some hills…the whole scene had a nice pleasant hue to it and we were impressed by the colours. It looked beautiful. The lack of real heat made things very bearable. We realised the need for wood for a campfire…of course, no real shrub with any chance of wood…and no trees for thousands of miles probably. Hmmm..we decided to find someone to borrow some wood from. We spotted a couple of mud houses along the highway soon thereafter…we stopped…a really old lady, a youngish girl who was constantly chatting on the cell phone (signal…there was a signal? huh!) and a very slow guy turned up. I tried my luck first…no luck. Dink stepped in with his version of sign language…no real luck either. We really couldnt get our point across to them…Kristie to the rescue, she walked straight into their house and pointed at the wood…ahhh…touche. They did point back at some torn up furniture outside their house and very big log. Hmmm…looked good for us. But they looked VERY poor and we didnt have the heart to take stuff from them for free…so we gave them a few thousand Togrog.

Anyway, we went on..the GPS showed some kind of lake closeby…we wanted to camp by the lake of course. After a while, we saw it…but it was way off the road…maybe a km off the road. The Suzuki might have reached it…but no chance for the Peugeot. We did scout the road for the next half hour or so for some kind of exit to the lake or some break in the scrubs to make a dash to the road…no luck again. Kristie was not too happy not camping next to the lake…sigh…anyway, we found a rather plain clearing among all the scrubs by the highway…looked like enough space for 2 tents. Cool…just when we were easing the car into close to the place, the Peugeot became a corvette again…vocally. Hmmm…man…exhaust pipe again. Of course, we had no interest whatsoever to fix it in the failing light…just parked the car not too off the road and resigned ourselves to try to pump in the tent nails into the stone hard ground with some rocks nearby…gave up after a while and weighed down the tent with some rocks at the corners which were still flapping about and prayed that it wont blow away in all the wind.

The crossroads...

There were a couple of Gers about 300m from our tents…we spotted loads of cattle, horses and sheep grazing about…hmmm…some of us (guess which ones… ) were willing to walk upto the Ger and ask for a nights rest inside. We decided not to in the end and got the campfire going…man…it was a wonderful fire. The stars were much more visible tonight…and we feasted on some pasta and some instant Mutter Paneer. The suddenly, just like that, out of the darkness…came this HUGE camel. It was a bit scary at first…because we could hardly see beyond a dozen feet from the light of our fire and then this camel looms into view suddenly…then we saw that its nose was pierced and it had some reins hanging off it. We spotted its owner almost immediately too. We were for a moment clueless…so we offered him some beer. He took it, squatted down and gulped in down in 2 minutes flat! We were trying to act quiet and nice in the meanwhile…he finally warned us about the fire…we were pretty close to the rather dry scrubs and he warned of a fire starting. We promised to be careful. And just like that, he turned away and walked into the darkness…he was gone within a second. I wonder how he walked in that terrain in the darkness…maybe the camel in tow might have helped somehow…no idea. This was our first sight of a camel rider…cool.

We relaxed for a bit…spoke about stuff for a while…and decided to crash. Dink and me pissed on the fire with all our might to put it off…the big log was still smouldering…so we used some river water left over from the last campsite. Kris watched some Bridewars and i watched the stars for a while…zzzzzzz it was then…