We said our goodbyes to Khan Uul hospital, and packed for our end-of-attachment adventure! We would be spanning the length of Mongolia on its North-South axis. We were going to the Gobi desert!
We started with an auspicious 5:30am wake-up to meet our guide for the trip, Duulguun. He turned out to be a softly spoken 25 year old with a wicked, dry sense of humour, and he quickly became one of the team.
10 hours to Dalanzadgad…
Our first stop was the anonymous bus station on the outskirts of town, for a ten hour journey to the “city” of Dalanzadgad in the South. Against all expectations the coach had seatbelts!
The driver played some banging traditional Mongolian music the entire way. We were seriously impressed that he had a ten hour collection of HD Mongolian music videos. No repeats! Alex quickly fell in love with Mongolian throat warbling.
Seriously though, Mongolian music is awesome!
And so commenced a boring bus ride through a landscape so featureless and barren that we may as well have been on Mars. On arrival we took a short walk through the city to take in the sights. These included the hotel, a shop, dinosaur statues, and wasteland with guarded by feral dogs. Charming!
Dinner was a treat: Jimbi is a Southern Mongolian mutton barbecue dish, and it is delicious! It comes with a side of desert onions, which we were to try raw in the next few days. The camels eat so much of the stuff that you don’t need to season their meat!
On a side note, the hotel in Dalanzadghad was probably a brothel. We didn’t get a great night’s sleep.
Petroglyphs and The Flaming Cliffs
Next day, we jumped into the back of a Russian van built in 1963. It was driven by Gaahna, our awesome driver for the next 4 days. The entire trip from here onwards was to be on dirt tracks. Even a Prius can’t handle that kind of a beating.
Our first destination was the “flaming cliffs” west of the city. But a lunch break at a mountain pass allowed us time to scramble in the hills looking for rock paintings.
These petroglyphs are up to 4000 years old, and are casually scattered through many hills in the desert, relatively preserved in the arid climate.
The paintings were an early means of self-expression for nomadic hillmen, and tell stories about their day to day experiences. They were painted using pigments from crushed lichen, and are by turns beautiful and amateurish!
En route to the flaming cliffs, we took vodka shots with some grandparents in a ger. The grandad was smoking a pipe. We ate dried meat, doughnut rings, amazing rice, goaty biscuits, goats milk, and goat curd. Emily and Alex made friends with a diseased baby goat. The vodka was so good that we bought some flasks of it to take home.
Eventually we arrived at our accommodation on the edge of a “forest”, 5km from the flaming cliffs. There to meet us was an affectionate dog named Buster, who was unaccountably infuriated by motorbikes.
As usual, we were sat in the middle of a vast, undulating steppe, with a completely unpolluted view of the night sky, Milky Way included. Incredible!
The only downside was the rickety toilet pit. You could catch three different kinds of plague down there. For the first time, and certainly not the last, the wild wee had come into its own.
That night, we drank vodka and played mushik with our guide and the driver. The driver was in cahoots with Emily. The driver won, whilst Duulguun went “flying” with the worst score we’ve seen yet.
The next morning we woke in time for sunrise over the sandy expanse. Buster the dog came with us for moral support. He had shoved his head into a bloody carcass, so was looking and smelling particularly distinctive.
Later on, we drove to the flaming cliffs. They are said to be a fossil gold-mine, and we spent a happy hour digging fruitlessly for bones in the sand.
Alex maintains that he dug up a dinosaur tail and Emily kept trying to give me larger and larger boulders as ‘presents’ to take home.
Khorgyn Els: The Sand Dunes!
Our drive to the sand dunes was marked out by a great restaurant in a one-horse town. I ate some absolutely delicious camel meat balls. As usual Mongolia has been on top culinary form.
We arrived at the dunes that afternoon and decided to climb the highest dune we could see. Duulguun told us he’d never made it to the top, even with his younger tourist clients. Challenge accepted!
This thing was steep – perhaps a 45 degree angle of soft, collapsing sand at its worst. The trick was to crawl on all four and break the trail like snow. It was possibly the biggest work out we’ve had in two months. We made it up in about half an hour! Emily and Jenny were the vanguard, whilst Alex cajoled/bullied Duulguun to keep going and joined 15 minutes later.
Within about 5 minutes of summitting we were forced off again by the vicious wind, which acted like a belt sander against your calves!
The descent was brilliant fun. We slid, tumbled, screamed and face-planted our way down, and frolicked in the sand for three hours.
We drove to our ger for the night. The place was teeming with baby goats. They clambered all over the roof of the ger and tried to eat Alex’s rucksack.
After dinner, we naturally took a sunset camel ride. This is probably where Alex picked up the large juicy tick he found two days later!
The ice canyon in the desert
Our final stop in the desert was the Yol Valley ice canyon. This is a massive granite mountain range with a frozen river which extends deep into steep-sided valleys.
We meandered down the path, occasionally fording the freezing river, and eventually we were walking confidently on several feet of ice, despite it being mid-May and very warm!
The pass narrowed to a corridor, through which the ice extends for several more kilometres. In colder months, you can walk the entire 8km along the ice. Not in May! The occasional crevasse warned of the dangers of thin ice.
Duulguun and Alex went a little further down the corridor, but turned back when they heard a tourist behind them fall into a crevasse! She fell in to her waist and was lucky to save herself from a 12 foot drop into the river below. That was all the warning we needed.
With our ice adventure curtailed, we decided to hike up a promising slope in the valley. After an hour of crawling up the scree and bracken along a goat trail, we reached the most incredible view of the trip. Sheer mountain peaks, ice river, and vast Mongolian steppe all in one.
The best bit for me, however, was the way down. This can only be done one way: scree surfing! It took less than ten minutes to descend over an hour’s worth of effort.
We stayed in a ger on the outskirts of the park. The host’s wife was away, and he couldn’t cook, so he hastily begged some khushuur (fried mutton pasties) from his neighbour’s wife.
We returned to UB via Dalanzadgad, taking the time to enjoy the spectacle of a community workout in the square.
We drove back to UB in a spacious people carrier. About five hours into the journey we loudly blew a tyre, and came to an abrupt stop.
For us, this was all part of the Mongolian experience! The driver deftly fitted his spare tyre, and we were under way again within 20 minutes.
Back in our flat, we had 12 hours to ready ourselves for the next section of the journey! The North!
The Mongolia Ambulance Project 