The Gobi Desert

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Mongolia is old school. In order to get a trip going we needed to find other people to share the cost of a jeep, driver and guide. So we started traipsing the streets of Ulaan Baatar to find them.

We left notices in all the hostels and cafes in town and took the emails of other peoples notes. Eventually we got a bite, two french girls wanted to join us on a tour of the Gobi, along with two Singaporeans. this made the trip pretty cheap, at $30 a day each. Which was cheaper than we could find anywhere else in the city, then the French girls started arguing with the guide and wanted it for $28. The Singaporeans left and told us they wouldn't go with the French as they couldn't bare the sight of them after our two hours of company!

So we lost the trip, eventually though, we managed to meet another couple, Allan and Gorsa (a Scottish-Polish couple) and then at the last minute Kiri, an Australian girl. The trip was back on! We left the next day before any more international relations broke down.

The first day was a lot of driving, the five of us in the back of an old Russian van, these vans are made for self-maintenance. Almost every part of the engine can be reached from the cab.

We stopped at a ger for lunch which was mutton noodles with Milk Tea, the noodles were digestible enough, but Milk tea just isn't tetleys.

It's warm milk, with some tea leaves sprinkled in it, Add a generous dose of salt, and if that isn't bad enough, it gets particularly grizzly when a bit of fried up mutton is squeezed over it to add a little fat in there.

Everything in Mongolia is designed to fatten you up for the winter.

After lunch we traveled onto our nighttime stop which was a ger in the middle of semi-arid desert. A ger is like a modern day teepee, slightly wider at the bottom, and it has a fire/stove inside. When the fire is on it's really warm, and when it's not, it's freezing!

Our second day was just as long, with more driving. We used pee stops to help with the motion sickness. Allan was first to throw up.

We arrived at our destination and were really in the desert now, it stretches on as far as the horizon, with the occasional mountain in the distance. You could never imagine such a landscape anywhere else in the world.

We started our third day with a hike to an Ice canyon. It was freezing, I'm not sure what we expected, given that it was a canyon made up of ice, but if our guide was right, it was -10c and this was daytime. After the ice canyon we went to the Mongolian Grand Canyon for some spectacular views. The earth was red brown and white, and many colours in between. You could really see the ages coming through the rocks. Lunch that day was pot noodle for vegetarians, or Camel dumplings (don't forget the L) for the omnivores.

Again, designed to fatten you up, camel dumplings are one of the fattiest things you can eat. Cutting open your dumpling you see that the lumps of fat are bigger than the lumps of meat. At the end of the day we had to ride a camel to the sand dunes, so I apologised to my camel for eating his brother. If he knew that the next day I'd be chucking up his brother on the sand dune, I swear he'd have thrown me off.

So, in the morning we climbed the sand dune, the camel meat finally budged from my stomach and appeared on the dunes of the Gobi.

Rhian, Allan and Gorsa made it to the top of the dune, I felt sorry for myself and only made it about 60% of the way. Kiri didn't get much further, her dodgy stomach on its way.

That night Kiri went to the toilet at least a dozen times, toilet being a loose term for "anywhere you can find to dump your stuff".

On our fifth day we saw the area where two dinosaur fossils had been found, apparently in mid fight when a sand dune had fallen on them. The fifth night was fun, as darkness fell on the Gobi, we were still in the van, looking for our final home. Eventually we arrived at a deserted village, an eerie place with around 20 buildings and no inhabitants. Our driver knew he was close but wasn't sure which direction the ger was in, so we circled the deserted village for over an hour.

Growing increasingly concerned we thought we might have to sleep in the village, until someone decided that the word deserted was interchangeable with haunted. This shed a different light on the prospect and we moved on! Our ger was eventually found and we didn't have to sleep in a haunted house!

The village it turns out was used some years ago for those mining in the Coal mines around the area. When the mines had been depleted the people left, and the village deserted, leaving a group of buildings standing vacant in the middle of the desert.

We drove back to Ulaan Baatar the next day and had a good shower, a decent sleep and then a good non-camel based meal.

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