A weeks jolly to the Gobi

The Gobi, once part of a large inland sea covers one third of Mongolia. Gobi is simply the Mongolian word for desert. Stretching from the southern region of Khovd in the West all way to the Dariganga region in the East and into northern China the area consists of scrub and rocky plains, with dunes only making up 3%. It is a land of extremes, it receives proper rainfall only every two or three years, and has temperatures soaring to +40 (Celsius) in the summer and dropping to a numbing -40 in the winter. Despite these hurdles life goes on and the Gobi is host to a wide range of fauna: Gazelle, Wild Ass, Takhi (Mongolian wild horses), Antelope, Vultures, Ravens, Buzzards, Desert Warblers, the Bactrian two humped camel and the worlds only desert bear, imaginatively named the Gobi bear, to name but a few. Unfortunately many of these animals are having a particularly tough time of it, apparently 28 species of mammals are endangered in Mongolia as a whole, some of which live in the Gobi: Wild Ass, Wild Bactrian Camels, Gobi argali sheep and the Gobi bear, of which there are only 25 left in the wild. The Flora mainly consists of saxaul, a stubby shrub; the wood of this shrub is so dense that it can sink in water.

The route we would be taking would make a triangle, heading south from UB, down towards the largest town in the south and regional capital, Dalanzagad, turning west towards Gurvan Saikham National Park and then heading north east back to UB. The trip was going to be seven days, six nights and we would be staying with families and friends of the driver along the way. The night before our departure Sam and I got prepared for our trip: Torch, penknife, basic first aid kit, thermals, hat gloves, toothbrush…the usual, and we got some supplies which consisted of plenty of noodles, tinned fruit, beer, vodka, jam, bottles of water and lots of cakes as we had two birthdays to celebrate! The French people we were travelling with were a little less prepared, turning up, after a heavy nights drinking with carrier bags full of beer, two bottles of vodka and little else.
Our driver got us, our bags and supplies neatly loaded up and we were ready for the off! Our drivers name was Baatar (which in Mongolian means Hero! and in French means bastard), he could speak a tiny bit of English, was 25 and wrestled when he wasn’t driving, he was a big lad. We had a whole days driving ahead of us so we settled in for a long stretch. The drive out of the city was the usual nerve wrecking experience and soon we were trundling along with UB fading away behind us. All of a sudden along a perfectly straight part of the road Baatar swerves off the tarmac along virgin land and the van springs into life, bouncing and rocking, moving more up and down, left and right than forward. Bataar turned and made what we thought was a joke “haha, road to Gobi”, we thought he was taking some kind of short cut or stopping off somewhere, but no, this was how it was going to be for the rest of the trip. It wasn’t the road to nowhere, it wasn’t even the dirt track to nowhere it was a ‘lets drive along nothing to nowhere’
Mongolia has 49500km of ‘roads’ (really in the loosest possible terms, not even tracks just areas where people may have driven before!) of which 2.9% is apparently mettaled. Of this 2.9% we would guess only about 40% of the tarmac actually remains so as a result the vehicle would have to be one tough cookie. To be honest when we saw our vehicle we thought it was a bit of a joke, it looked like a soviet style camper van and it was errr… Russian. We had seen plenty of them around (in Russia and Ukraine) and really wanted to ride in one, but not really for an expedition to the dessert! Still, we reassured ourselves, if they were good enough to be Ukrainian ambulances then they were good enough for us.. It turned out to be great. The engine was inside the van on the front seat between the driver and passenger, good for keeping and eye on it and minimising potential dust in the engine. It was high up, comfy and could be repaired by nomads with hammers and scrap metal.
We drove for about eight hours on the first day. Our days with regard to driving normally involved aiming to leave at about 9am, driving until lunchtime, a lunch break, continue driving and stopping off at any sights and aiming to arrive at the camp between 4-6pm.
Not long into our bumpy journey we spotted what we think were white tailed deer. Now any normal driver or safari tour would stop and let you observe the wildlife in a peaceful way… instead Bataar hurtled off the track with his foot was firmly on the gas of the soviet beast rocketing us towards the large group of deer. They ran, and ran, veering left then right, but Baatar wasn’t going to give up easily, he chased them across the flat and started up the side of a hill, these things are quick and there was no way we were going to catch them without doing some serious damage to the van and ourselves who were getting thrown about and whooping in the back, so after a few minutes we surrendered and headed back to the track, all feeling quite exhilarated! The scenery was, in a word, barren. We saw a total of five cars all day, the endless stretching scrub plains and rock-strewn hills went rolling by, hour after hour. We would sometimes spot a glimmer of life in the wasteland; a camel, nomad camp or some horses and we would all point and stare at this bit of brain sugar until it passed, swallowed up by the scrub. This may sound boring and I perhaps haven’t painted an alluring picture, but this is the place for your mind to wander, the unrelenting space and scenery invites you to almost dream while awake. It really is something to see and be a part of. If someone was to ask us for a visual representation of infinity (ya know like they always do..) we would have to bring them to Mongolia, it sounds cheesy but we have never seen the horizon so far away, just endless land joining an endless sky a long long way away. Occasionally we followed telegraph poles connecting distant dusty towns, the poles in a dead straight line hundreds of them visible for as far as you could see. The track we were driving on was no more than a few tyre prints in the dust or snow, and every so often Battar would turn off, drive randomly across the desert to then pick up a new trail. How he knew when to turn off and were exactly to go still remains a mystery, Mongols must have some sort of innate honing system/GPS to find their way through this wilderness, his skills as a driver were to become even more apparent as the week progressed.

By late afternoon on the first day we had arrived at what was our first stop, smooth rocky outcrops which we climbed up. It was good to get some invigorating exercise after the long bumpy drive, it was extremely windy, the sort of wind that laughs in the face of clothes and bites right through. After all the cobwebs had been blasted out and we had taken in the rolling, mustard yellows and ochre’s, faded greens and greys, stretching out to the horizon, disappearing round hills and rocky projections we warmed up in the van as we headed towards our first nights accommodation. The camp was located strangely amongst clumps of knee high tough grasses, it was the only vegetation for a long way so must have been some kind of oasis, but don’t get the wrong impression, this was far from lush – just some dry dead grass in amongst the dry barren steppe. We unloaded into our yurt, everything in the car has to be moved into the yurt as the temperatures drop well below freezing during the night. The yurt is a great piece of planning for the nomads; These round felt tents can be erected or dismantled in a couple of hours, they are fairly large and are used as communal living quarters, kitchen, living room, bedroom, everything happens in these round tents. In the centre of all Yurts is a small stove with a chimney extending out of the top of the tent. These stoves are more often than not, kept alive by animal poo, yak, goat, camel, whatever animal is being kept.
Spring in Mongolia is unfortunately the harshest time of year for the nomads, the rain normally falls towards the end of the summer so the spring is dry, dusty, windy and unforgiving. It’s a time when the weaker animals die and lie frozen until the sun defrosts them. Summer is hectic and busy with many chores and looking after livestock, so strangely the nomads actually like the savage winters as it’s a time of relaxation. We were visiting in spring and it was clear death was all around, dead dogs, camels, sheep, even one of the nomads we were due to visit was caught out in freak weather and died. This was a man who must have grown up knowing the dangers and who still fell prey to the savage conditions. The weather in Mongolia is extremely fickle as very quickly the temperature can drop unexpectedly catching you out. On a positive note the Mongolians like to call the sky blue heaven, it really is the polar opposite to the sky in Britain as they have over 260 cloudless days every year, no clouds just a brilliant blue (cold) sky!
The yurt was heated up by the dung stove in the middle of the room worked surprisingly well. This first night was the only night we would get to use yak poo as a fuel which we determined was the best and most efficient out of all the animal waste fuels (we got to try a couple of different types). The yak poo didn’t have a pungent aroma when burnt, it caught alight quickly, burnt for a long time when compared to the others and gave off a lot of heat. In fact the dung fires were so good that quickly the yurt would become uncomfortably hot and you would have to start taking off all your clothes, when it came to going to sleep it was far to hot to sleep in your sleeping bag so we would fall asleep on top, sweating. When the fire died down the temperature would quickly drop waking you up a few hours later in the absolute pitch black damn cold sending you deep into your sleeping bag, the mornings were bitterly cold until the fire was lit again.
The food on this first night would become a staple for the rest of our trip, it was mutton with lumps of mutton fat in rice served up with tea. The mutton and rice was not too bad but became a little boring after a while. The tea here is not what you would imagine tea to look like, it’s a grey milky salty liquid with the smallest amount of tea in, so small that it actually tastes nothing like tea. Mongolians buy the worst lowest quality tea from china, its all the scraps and stalks compressed into big blocks which they use a small amount boiled in whatever milk is available, usually camel or goat. Its actually very nice but its not tea, more just a warm salty milk drink.
The breakfast was not so good. We were given large flat unleavened bread biscuits that were rock solid, old ships biscuits are like soft cookies in comparison. As we were given a flask of hot water and a pan at the same time I was convinced we had to soak them to soften them… after 15 mins they were still rock solid! The woman who had given us the bread laughed when she saw what we were trying to do and showed us that you actually had to break it up and eat it hard and crunchy style. It really hurt your teeth and as it contained no salt or sugar it just tasted like hard old flour, it wasn’t good. Sometime we were also given some kind of hardened yak milk that was truly pungent and absolutely disgusting. I love blue, strong cheese but this was something else, rock hard, flaky and really rank smelling. It always just sat there untouched.
With cloudless skies every sunset was amazing, bright colours splashed all over the place followed by the darkest nights possible. For some reason the sky was without the moon all week (is this the new moon period of the lunar cycle?), we think it rose later in the morning but we are not sure, anyway having no moon meant you could see absolutely nothing except every star visible to the naked eye and a small slither of light maybe from the doorframe of the yurt. Watching the stars was amazing and if you looked long enough then satellites and shooting stars could be seen, the only problem was the cold! The temperature was lower that -20 (but no wind!) some nights so you couldn’t really hang around looking up, if you inhaled through your nose you could feel the snot freezing hard and when my nose ran it would crystallise in my beard (nice!).

The second day was another long day of off road driving, another chance to sit back with some music and let your mind wander, another chance to think to yourself what the hell are these people doing here. The past winters have been particularly hard and the rains have come late so apparently a lot of livestock has died making their lives even more difficult. Being there you can’t help think how its strange and remarkable that these people are trying to survive in a desert, trying to graze their livestock in an environment that is doing everything possible to kick them out.
In the afternoon we stopped and some bright red fiery cliffs famous for the dinosaur expeditions in the 1920s that uncovered huge amounts of bones and fossils in the soft sedimentary rocks. It was a nice place to walk about and clamber up and down the cliffs.
On the second day of driving we saw no one else all day and had a puncture about lunchtime so worryingly we were driving without a spare for the next day and a half.
The second evening our camp was even more remote than before and the temperature dropped to a very low level. We were using camel dung on the fire which did not burn as efficiently as yak dung and smelt not so good. There were four gers at this site, the owners were camel herders with quite a lot of camels.
The next morning because of the low temperatures the car would not start. The driver had to blow torch the bottom of the engine for about half an hour before we could then try and bump start it, whilst he was underneath it was notice that the suspension was looking a little ropy. Whilst we were waiting for them to repair that we played about with the children and helped the family out with some of their jobs. They were busy milking the camels and getting the camels out to the various different areas to graze or drink. We were able to try camels milk for the first time here which was nice.
This third day was Sarah’s birthday, luckily after the late start we did not have much driving to do, after about 4 hours we were in Dalanzadgad, the regional capital of the southern aimegs

Dalanzadgad was something out of a Wild West film. Wide dusty, dirt streets, wooden fencing everywhere, the town seemed very still, some tumble weed blowing between the streets wouldn’t have gone amiss. The differences however were enough to make you remember you are in Mongolia; the round Gers, now in fenced off compounds, camels tied up in the yard peering over the fence, some people still wearing traditional dress, and the screams of children as they came springing past on top of camels seemingly out of control. The town was a maze of these dust streets and Ger compounds, but Baatar got us to our third nights stop. It was quite early, about 3-4pm. We unloaded all our stuff and the very friendly lady brought us tea and a big pile of sweet scones and biscuits. We were in this town, easily a couple of kilometres through the maze of streets from the tiny town centre, we would need a guide to help us find our way! Just then Baatar announced there was a camel festival going on a couple of kilometres out of town, so we hastily grabbed the cameras and jumped back in the van. The camel festival was actually a big camel polo tournament, we saw at least 10-12 teams. Camel polo is a great game, these large cumbersome looking animals hurriedly loping around the pitch, being dragged this way and that by their nose, the riders on top leaning off them at crazy angles and hitting the polo ball towards the goal, which by then has a large camel standing side on in it with the goalie in the unfortunate position of trying to stop the goal being scored. It is a great game and one is at serious risk of being trampled if the ball comes near the sideline. The other highlight was the penalty shoot out. The crowds and other teams stream onto the pitch and create an alleyway of spectators and camels, the team members then have goes at penalty shooting, which involves the camel and rider running down the alleyway of people and scoring a goal. The audience gets very involved with lots of shouting and cheering. We stayed there for an hour or two before heading back to town. Baatar dropped us off near some showers and a shop. We knew there was a bar around here somewhere so managed to get Baatar to come back in two hours. The town centre mainly involved a couple of small squares, with very little in them, however past the outdoor pool tables we found ‘The Gobi Bear’ bar, also attached to a shop, so two birds with one stone! We sat down to a couple of beers and ordered some food, which involved us pointing at an incomprehensible line on the menu. All the meals were variations on mutton, rice and mutton fat. Sam had bite size deep fried mutton bones which were 90% fat and some rice. Mine was a bit better as it didn’t have so much fat.

The following day we spent trying to cross over a mountain range to make it to an area of large sand dunes which apparently sing in the wind, the only problem was it had snowed heavily the previous night making all previous tracks invisible. Because of the lack of tracks we spent most of the morning trying to find the way around large gullies cutting off our route over the mountains. After a few hours of not much luck, being stuck in deep snow and crashing into a ditch hidden by snow our driver said that it wasn’t going to be possible so we headed to a different area.

This camp was situated in a field of sand dunes with some small shrub like trees doted about. The family we stayed with were camel herders who were scratching a living in a really inhospitable area of the country, trying to keep their camels alive in the harsh desert. We spent two days here exploring the area, climbing sand dunes and taking some of the camels out for a ride, something which I did not enjoy initially but once I was handed by reigns and whip it was great fun trying to make my slow camel run instead of eat! The food here was very bad, just very sandy rice with flecks of fat, the sand would have not been so bad if we had not seen the amount of poo all over the place. Basically if the sand was from outside the ger then it would have been touching poo.

The last evening was spent in a hilly area with some slight vegetation further north and probably just outside of the Gobi zone. Really we were just killing time before we could head back to UB as by this time we were all desperate for a decent meal and some kind of wash (no washing so far so everyone was feeling a little skanky). Sarah and I walked up a near by hill with a can of beer and our books to chill out on top to watch the sunset and talk about the trip so far.

The last day of driving was an epic 8 hours off-road past some pretty uneventful scenery. Stopped off at a relatively nice restaurant where we had a nice long lunch. I should have been suspicious when my food came out 15 minutes before everyone else’s but it tasted good at the time. Arrived back in UB just in time for rush hour so from the outskirts of the city it took us at least an hour to get back to the hostel. Because the water supply to the hostel was down we headed straight out for food, a nice big pepperoni pizza. Unfortunately two hours later it all came back up after my dodgy lunch, such a waste of good pizza. Sarah then had to spend a night with me running out of the room often to empty various bodily chambers.

All in all the trip was amazing and a great chance to see some of Mongolia’s wildest landscapes. The people were incredible, the scenery was epic and the journey was more of an expedition than anything else.
We were not sure what to expect from the people we met, perhaps we thought they lived like this because they had no other choice or because they knew no different, maybe it would be awkward to stay with them but this could not have been further from the truth. It seemed that the nomads in Mongolia positively enjoyed the countryside and chose this lifestyle, they knew from the satellite TV what life was like elsewhere but chose to stay away from the big city, too busy, too many people and no place for your animals. Even though they see every sunrise every day one nomad still walked up to me and said (I think) how beautiful the sunrise was then stood and enjoyed it with me for five minutes before mounting his camel to head of with his heard. In these tiny communities there is no privacy as everyone shares one or two gers, everything is done together and family bonds are so strong. The locals thought it was very strange that we knocked on the door before we entered and just expected us to walk on in and sit down, when we did just walk in and sit down in front of the tv they would not bat an eyelid, it would hardly register with them, you just sit there and a few minutes later some tea would appear, but everyone else is either mesmerised by the tv or getting on with their jobs.
We were told the main factor for nomads moving to towns or the city were the need for modern services such as healthcare or education for children or if they have a sick/old family member who needs looking after.
When you first turn up to a ger camp people shout a greeting which would mean in English ‘can I come in’ but what it actually translates to is ‘Hold the dog!’ we found this quite funny.

Oh we also visited a frozen river in a rock canyon with a large frozen waterfall.. forgot to mention!