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Diary w/e 9 July
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3rd JulyHad another good lie in in the hotel in Omsk. slightly too long perhaps and we left the hotel at 11. We then tried to negotiate the maze that is the Omsk traffic system. This ended up with us driving underneath the road that we wanted to be on, and then driving towards some military base or something before sharply stopping, turning around and asking directions in Englissian from a nice group of people dressed in green with guns. Needless to say we parted on good terms (thankfully) but none the wiser as to our route. If I carry on getting wordier and wordier in my language, soon I will be helpless in my demise towards incomprehensibility and my prose will become a hopeless case of oxbridgeesque gobbledygook. Anyway we found the road (after an hour!) and there we stayed until 11:30pm (with the odd break for food and fuel). I had a MONSTER drive and did 400 miles straight, then dad got bored (and got cramp in his leg) and did another 120. Now we are set up in a field just off the road. We decided that rather than cook and eat mossie flesh this evening, we would stop at a cafe and ask for Plov - and it worked! We also got a few other things because my needle got stuck on "da". They were mostly edible, though we are still not quite sure what some of them were. So we ate like kings for 200 roubles (£4.50) all in, and no washing up, flies or mossies! It didn't take us long to work out how to do this camping on the road in Siberia thing. When we then finally found a place to stop in the gathering gloom, it was a mad farcical dash to throw everything we needed up into the tent and zip the mesh shut so we could safely hurl abuse at the insects from our sanctuary. We saw more notable roadsigns today, including the first appearance of Irkutsk (now less than 1;700 Km away, glory be!) So Mongolia is almost in reach - well, only about another week's drive, anyway! If the roads are as good as they have been today, it will be a snip. The road from Omsk to Novosibirsk went on and on and on and on, with a bend thrown in every hundred miles or so just to keep you awake. From time to time we saw the main Trans Siberian Railway line - even some trains on it as well. At another point we were stopped at a level crossing as a goods train with no less than 61 big cars went past. Nearly time for lunch there and then! I didn't like the Omsk to Novosibirsk road much - the scenery was very open and flat - the usual mixture of clumps of wood, big open fields (some cultivated, many not) and stagnant lakes (according to the map, some of them 50 to 100 miles long). There was very little traffic - which made for easy driving, but was a bit spooky on a wide open straight road. When we stopped half way for fuel, the station was like a fortress - with a huge long steel rod poking out where you had to put your money in a steel box and push it through the wall to the cashier, with your change coming back afterwards in the same way. Again, one way glass so you couldn't see anyone. And the place where we stopped to make ourselves sandwiches for lunch was very quiet - only a couple of other people there, who drove off pretty quickly. I get the feeling everyone likes to keep moving along this stretch of road - especially when (as today) it is 30 degrees plus and blazing hot sun! At least no thunderstorms today, though, and pleasantly cool in the evening. Another feature we have noticed is that every now and then there are public inspection ramps at the side of the road, so you can drive your car up the ramp and fix it from underneath. In some places they are locked and you have to pay a fee, but often they are free in laybys - another sign of just how much on the job car repairing your average Russian has to do. So tonight we are mostly not drinking Siberian beer and discussing Madonna in a wood about 100 miles northeast of Novosibirsk, off the M53 road to Kemerovo. The GPS might be added tomorrow, but if we open the tent now to get the position, the mosquitoes will bite our faces off. 4th JulyHad a very early start this morning as we has to leg it out onto the road where there weren't any insects. We started driving at ten to eight, and got about a hundred miles under our belt before stopping for breakfast. It was a really bright morning and the sun woke us up around 7am. After his efforts of yesterday, Rich wasn't good for much before about midday (no change there, then). We got a bit lost in Kemerovo because they had closed the main route through town to the bridge for resurfacing. We found bits of that town which nobody knows exists, but eventually we escaped - though not before we had been enthusiastically greeted by a couple of lads in a pimped up Lada at some traffic lights. After Kemerovo, we had a recurrence of our engine cutting out problem. Easily sorted - this time it simply looks as if the new connection to the fuel pump was shorting out due to a bit of dirt. We cleaned it up a bit and it gave no more problems. We must go round it properly with a load of insulating tape when we next have a bit of spare time away from the insects. Rich took over the driving at this point and I fell into an uneasy doze with dreams of scary fairground rides. When I woke up, we were in a slightly unexpected place and it turned out we had taken a wrong road which added about 50 miles to the day's drive. But the roads remained largely good so that was only a minor irritation. So it wasn't the navigator's fault for being asleep then? At lunchtime we stopped at a place called Marinsk where we were crossing a bridge and saw the usual gaggle of locals swimming in the river. We took our picnic there, but decided not to join them in the water because we didn't really want to add a load of time to our lunch stop. We then drove through our biggest summer storm yet. The lightning was everywhere, other cars were simply pulling over and stopping to wait for conditions to improve, but we pushed gamely on in our bullet proof (if slightly leaky) tank - though the visibility through driving rain and hail at one point was so bad that we could not even see the road properly and we could go no faster than 25 mph. After about 20 miles of this, we drove out from under the dark clouds and it turned back into a normal hot muggy day again. The only other excitement (apart from a quick stop at a supermarket and good old Plov again for dinner at a roadside cafe!).was a rather nasty road accident which we saw shortly after Krasnoyarsk on a bridge under repair. A lorry had come badly unstuck in some way and the road was completely blocked. But the resourceful Russians knew there was a new road being build nearby which would go around the problem and so we followed the procession (and of course our Land Rover took the rather bumpy off-road parts in its stride). We felt things were going so well that we would push on for another late night, so we finally pulled off the road and hid behind another wood at around 11pm local time (having crossed yet another time zone - we are now 7 hours ahead of UK time). Rich needed a private moment with a spade, a forest and 10,000,000 mossies, I decided to defer the agony until tomorrow morning, when the adversary will be flies rather than mossies - which I prefer. The end result is that we have covered 564 miles today, and if we can manage another day like that tomorrow, we will get to Irkutsk and will then have made up the time we lost in Ekaterinburg with the brake problem. The roads have generally surprised us - we were expecting some much more ropey stretches than we have actually had. For example today, we were able to keep up a fairly steady 60-65 mph all day, except for about 10 miles of really bumpy road (at one point, it looked just like a mogul field) and the times when the weather forced us to slow down. On fuel prices, we are now paying around 17 roubles (39p) a litre for diesel (the highest on the trip so far) and from the way our fuel consumption has gone up, we are convinced that the quality is pretty poor. But the Land Rover was built for such abuse, and we aren't worried about it as long as we keep up with the oil changes - it will need one by the time we get to Ulaan Baatar. The scenery since Novosibirsk has changed. Up to then we had very flat wide open plains and forests, but since then it has been much more hilly - nothing mountainous, just enough to give a bit of variety to the landscape and make it feel a little less alien. Also, everywhere has felt a little less deserted and a little more domesticated than the complete no man's land between Omsk and Novosibirsk. We shall see tomorrow what the road from here to Irkutsk is like. We have promised ourselves a night in a hotel tomorrow by way of celebration if we make it all the way there (and if anyone will have us, of course - we are both tatty and malodorous!) It probably says something that today's best entertainment was caused by me trying to clean my teeth whilst wearing a mossie face net this evening - nasty mess in the mouth area! That's not true, the pot holes were the most entertaining bit, trying to avoid them and then listening to the new noises that the Land Rover makes when you hit a big one at 60mph. Tonight, therefore, we are mostly doing exactly the same as last night, but 564 miles further east - at GPS ref N.55º 45' 52.7", E 94º 54' 0.0", to be precise (about 75 miles east of Krasnoyarsk). So we are a quarter of the way around the world from home, and not finished yet! According to the trip, we have done over 5200 miles so far! Not bad for a fortnight. 5th JulyWe spoke too soon! Today was the day the Russian roads came back and bit us. In short, even though we left at 10am and drove with hardly a break until midnight, we only managed 450 miles, so we are still over 100 miles short of Irkutsk and our comfy hotel bed. Rats! Do we feel smelly now!! The day started well enough - a bit of a lie-in but away by 10, stopping for breakfast and a bit of a tidy up just after Kansk (where the biggest excitement was a large military air base next to the road, we could see all sorts of jets in blast shelters near the road, and one particularly tenacious jet was doing circuits and bumps, going round every ten minutes or so while we were eating our breakfast. We didn't take any photos, just in case! Kansk was where we heard our first funny noise from underneath the car. Can't really describe it, but it seemed to last only about a minute and then disappear - though it did the same again a couple of times later in the day. The engine, steering and brakes all seem absolutely fine, so we are at a bit of a loss to know what it is. When the UK woke up later and we got back into mobile phone range, we described it all to Rob at Liveridge, and he was at a loss as well, but reassured us it was almost certainly nothing serious. We will just have to see how it develops over the next few days. The car was certainly well tested after Kansk. The road had a few reasonable stretches, but long sections of it were little more than an offroad track, with huge potholes, bumps and ruts. There was a road sign giving some kind of warning a couple of times, and the bit we could understand (the kilometre post numbers) told us that in total, 380km of the road we have covered today is officially recognised as so poor that it is being completely reconstructed or something - they are certainly not bothering with repairing it. On some parts, we were only able to go about 15-20mph for long stretches, with a lot of weaving all over the place to try and find the least punishing line for the car between the holes. There were only a handful of heavy goods vehicles braving this part of the road - it looks as if the Russian trucker's map effectively ends at Krasnoyarsk and then doesn't start again until Irkutsk. What we did notice however were loads and loads of right hand drive cars and small commercial vehicles being driven the other way, most of them with the fronts covered in protective tape and other wrapping. We estimate about 90% of the east-west traffic through the worst sections was of this type. I had heard that there is a flourishing market in Moscow for second hand Japanese cars, with many private entrepreneurs heading east to buy second hand and then drive them back to Moscow to sell them on. We reckon we saw at least 200 - 300 cars heading west, so if today was an average day, that would mean about 1,750 second hand Japanese cars a week heading for the Moscow market - though presumably only through the summer months as this road would be near enough impassable in the winter. Some of them were clearly travelling in little convoys (apparently they are preyed upon by the gentlemen of the road, so they group together for security) and we saw some multi-tasking (in one case, a small commercial truck with a car loaded on the back and towing a second car). From the way they drove through the bad sections of road, I wouldn't be keen on buying one of these cars once they reached Moscow! As well as lots of Japanese made cars, Rich also thought he saw some European cars, which is quite ironic! Many of the small commercial trucks still had Japanese writing on the sides. Anyway, the combination of our hold ups over our funny noise and the extremely poor roads left us well short of our target of Irkutsk tonight, so we have done the usual - gone late into a roadside cafe and bought "Shashlik" (kebabs, cooked on a charcoal grill outside - the smoke keeps the mossies away as well) and then driven on in the dark until we found a place to park up off the road behind some trees and put the roof tent up. We might well find that we are surrounded by workmen in the morning - we are close to some electricity transmission equipment where there has clearly been work recently. But it was already past midnight, and in the dark we were struggling to find anywhere. No great thunderstorms today for a change, and the landscape has slowly changed from hilly and forested to slightly more flat and open as we get nearer to Irkutsk and the great Lake Baikal (of which more tomorrow, hopefully). This evening it has even been cool enough for Rich to wear his trucker's cap, which has made him very happy. We are also getting the hang of getting from car into tent with maximum efficiency - minimising the number of mossies that make it in with us. The most entertaining event of the day was when we were stopped at a police checkpoint (for the first time in a couple of days) quite late on in the day. The policeman came up to the window and we thrust our bag of papers at him with the usual "nye panymayoo par Russki" but he pushed it back at us and basically just said "moeny". We thought "here we go" and prepared to part with as little cash as possible after being as awkward as possible, but he then asked for European money, so we thought things might be getting a little more expensive. So we collected a few bits of European change and held it out to him. He started fingering through it, saying "Yest" (or something like that - which clearly means "Got") and showed no interest in most of it - then he saw a German-minted 5 cent coin and was over the moon. He was obviously asking if we minded very much if he took it. It turned out our traffic policeman was in reality just a keen numismatist, looking to complete his collection of European small change. He clearly had all the pound coins he wanted (though we had the versions with the royal coat of arms and the welsh leek on the reverse, both of which he clearly had but he was very hopeful we might have one with a thistle - but we didn't, unfortunately.) After he had taken a good look through our collection of small change from across Europe, and relieved us of about 20p's worth of it (clearly asking politely, and acting like a happy schoolboy when we said OK), he happily waved us on our way - he really wasn't interested in all that boring passport, papers and "where are you going" stuff! Can't tell you exactly where we are this evening, as the batteries on the GPS have died and we would be bitten to shreds by the mossies if we got out of the tent to get replacements. Sorry! 6th JulyGot woken up at 7 in an insect infested field because dad heard a truck go past (so obviously it was time to get up). No time for breakfast until about 11:30. Continued driving all day (I see a pattern emerging here) and got to a hotel with a shower in Ulan Uday where we are now writing this diary. It doesn't sound very interesting when you put it like that, and that's probably about right. This was our fourth day on the trot of solid driving, interspersed only by short nights in the tent behind a clump of trees somewhere, dodging the bugs. So today we were determined to make it to Ulan Uday and hole up somewhere comfortable with showers, toilets and proper beds. So we drove 460 miles, starting at 7.30 and finishing 12 hours later. So in four days, we have covered over 1,800 miles, and we are feeling ready to move on to Mongolia, the main event. We have snapped at each other a couple of times today under the pressure, but that has passed pretty quickly - we do need to make sure we keep eating and sleeping enough and doing things like washing, to keep our morale up! In 12 hours today, we drove into Irkutsk (and very rapidly out of it - even by Russian standards, the traffic is absolutely crazy there); we drove through the near-Alpine region around Lake Baikal (the world's largest freshwater lake by some way, and repository of one fifth of all the fresh water in the world, apparently) - very beautiful in places. Also, strangely insect-free - which is perhaps why the Russians like the area so much! The lake itself is 163 miles long and about 20 miles wide, so it is VERY IMPRESSIVE close up. But we still haven't seen anything resembling a campsite anywhere in Russia. We stopped for breakfast at the roadside after we had been going a few hours. From the layby we were in, you could see the most extraordinary development of about 5 or 6 massive new houses, all within a security permiter with a guard on the gate, and fancy cars with blacked-out windows going in and out. All very suspicious, especially when we heard a crackle of small arms fire coming from somewhere nearby, including automatic and semi-automatic (Uzis and AKs. Ha Ha. No, really.) We packed up our breakfast as calmly as we could and hared off! We saw the aftermath of a couple of road accidents - one was apparently the result of some Russian overtaking - one car with its front completely smashed in and the other lying on its side across the road (with various people standing around looking bemused, as if that sort of thing happens around here!) The second was a quite spectacular one, where a lorry had clearly run away downhill and smashed into the banked up barrier protecting the main Trans-Siberian railway line, over which it had half climbed, Evil Kneevil fashion (have I spelt that right?) before coming to a halt with the cab hanging in mid air about ten feet short of the passing trains, both front wheels torn off and pushed back underneath it - the photos are quite a sight (the accident had clearly happened a day or two previously, and the cab appeared miraculously undamaged). The roads were much better than yesterday, and still very few trucks - though the flood of right hand drive vehicles heading in the opposite direction remains unabated. We have even noticed that quite a lot of "locals" actually use these vehicles as well. But it looks as if Irkutsk and points east are well and truly off the Russian trucker's map. Hardly any HGV's to be seen. We were stopped at a couple of police checkpoints, but after a cursory glance at our papers, we were quickly waved on both times - slightly strangely, with a salute each time - maybe there is still something in the "military" theory! No coin collecting policeman today, though - and the checkpoints are much fewer and more spread out than further west. We are holed up in a quite modern hotel which used to be a haunt of top communist party officials. Our room even has a bath with a plug in (so much more convenient than a rolled up sock for doing the handwashing without instantly losing all the water!) They offered two rates, one with and one without evening meal. We took the "with" option, as we were feeling lazy. Then we were presented with a normal menu in the restaurant and couldn't work out what the "set" menu actually was. That was because there wasn't one! When the bill for the meal arrived (!) they had simply deducted the extra amount we had paid for the "with dinner" hotel price! Richard got some tongue in his mixed cold meats starter, and didn't like the furry bits very much! The room even has a mini bar - and a routine item is a full sized bottle of vodka. We even saw one bottle being served up to three diners in the restaurant, as if it was wine. They are famed drinkers around here, apparently. We allowed ourselves a beer each and a small bottle of mineral water.... After four very hard days on the road, non-stop, we were (until we had wonderful showers this evening) absolutely filthy and smelly, and there is a thick layer of road dust over everything in the car. As we had a chilly night (in fact it stayed quite cloudy, cool and dampish until this afternoon), the fridge had got a bit carried away with itself and frozen our milk - so breakfast cereals were a bit interesting for that reason as well as the small arms fire. Our clothes were all filthy, so the balcony of this posh-ish hotel now looks like a chinese laundry full of hand washing hanging out to dry. We have now caught up all the time we lost on the brake problem, and we are nearly a whole day ahead of my original schedule. And no more funny noises from under the car. Because we were warned that hotel rooms in UB will be as rare as hen's teeth over the next week or so (because of Nadaam festival and the 800th anniversary of Mongolian Statehood celebrations), we are thinking about staying here one more night before heading down to the border (which is only a couple of hundred miles away now), after the 6,000+ miles we have come). That way, we are less likely to find ourselves forced to camp for an extended period somewhere busy around the city without running water, etc. But watch this space, no decision yet. So this evening, we are mostly luxuriating in the Geser Hotel and Laundry, Ulan Uday, at GPS ref N 51° 50' 12.6", E 107° 34' 55.6", and still 8 hours ahead of UK time. Night night! 7th JulyA scorching hot day. We lay in late, missing breakfast. The wake up call was from a Russian "lady of the night" called Natasha who was offering certain services. As it was 8am and I was planning a little more sleep, I was a little short with her. What a time to call! Apparently this is not uncommon in Russia, because the hotel bedrooms have direct dial numbers. When we did finally emerge from our lie in, have cold showers, take in the washing etc, it was lunchtime and 37 degrees. We stepped out into town to find somewhere to eat, dodging from shade to shade as much as we could. The two most likely looking places in Lonely Planet had both disappeared, so we went on an extended trek, ignoring fast food places and finally fetching up at another Lonely Planet recommendation, in a most unpromising part of town. In fact it was ok (and it had air conditioning!), and the waitress spoke some English so were rescued from the usual random chance element of menu selections. Still lots of dill on the salads, though! After eating, Richard rediscovered the power of speech and the day started to improve. Ulan Uday has the world's biggest bust of Lenin in its central square. It feels like quite a relaxed place - not too frantic, and a long way from the place where they make all the rules. At least half of the faces we see are of asiatic appearance, but there doesn't seem to be any friction between them and the caucasian Russians. Perhaps today it was just too hot for anyone to argue! The town has a slight feeling of faded grandeur about it - it was a big tea trading post at one time, but fell on hard times before beginning something of a renaissance now. There is some modern development going on, but still a lot of old-style wooden houses with more DIY repair to my standard. It really is a HUGE HEAD. The mobile phone network is ok if you want to talk or send texts (not for me!!!), but it has no GPRS, so we were not able to update the website last night using the mobile. We are actually doing it on a computer in the Hotel's internet centre - though I suspect the download speeds will be very poor. Tonight we will get ourselves sorted out, change some travellers cheques (banks are open until 7pm and there is apparently one in Ulan Uday who have heard of American Express). Then we will try for an early start for the border in the morning. So probably another hot and rather tense day with some driving and a lot of waiting. At least we will start with a full load of clean clothes! So you'll have to do with yesterday's GPS reference. Hopefully the mossies won't be quite so active tonight - last night we only had a few, and they weren't giving painful or itchy bites, they just rubbed me up the wrong way, so we have left a few squished trophies on the wall to go with the collection in the Land Rover. Hopefully I will be a bit more relaxed tonight - maybe a bottle or two of vodka....? Any update we manage tomorrow will probably be quite short, and it may not happen at all for a day or two, depending on how things work out. Bring on the sat phone... 8th JulyWe managed it!! We escaped from Russia into Mongolia. But of course it wasn't straightforward! We got up in time for a reasonable breakfast at the hotel, including porridge (very nice) and then repacked the Land Rover a bit and generally got things sorted out. We then headed off about 11.30 for the border. We stopped to fill up with fuel on the way, and it seemed like the whole world was heading in the same direction. We had a sudden fear that we would find ourselves stuck on the border with thousands of Mongolians crossing over to join in the celebrations. But the traffic rapidly thinned and when we arrived at Kyakta at about 2pm, we had been driving almost on our own for the last hour or so. As we drove through the border town, we saw a quite large Russian military presence, including a big barracks with dozens of trucks and tanks parked up all ready for action. Can't think who they are worried about! The only interest on the road (apart from the scenery, which was becoming much more like a rather bigger and slightly rounded version of Scotland and less like Siberia) was a last Russian traffic cop checkpoint near the border. The policemen were of Mongol stock, and pulled us over looking very serious. We clenched our teeth for one last tussle with the Russian law enforcement system, especially when the first one came over and said "money" through the window at me, waving away the bag of papers I was thrusting at him. With a sigh, I reached for my wallet, but he pushed that away as well, and eventually I got the message that we had another coin collecting traffic cop. So I reached for my parking meter change pot (which is still in the front of the car!) and gleefully picked out a full set of English money (total value £1.88 or about 85 Roubles) and gave them to him one by one. His eyes got bigger with each coin I passed out and he was so delighted he called his mate over (who also turned out to be a coin collector) but I drew the line at handing out another set. They lost all interest in us and our car and absent mindedly waived us on our way as the both peered closely at the treasure in their hands. When we got to the actual crossing point, it was full of loads of happy looking Mongolians, often packed as many as 10 to a people carrier, heading home. There were only a couple of trucks (carrying timber) and a whole army of street traders looking to sell things like beer. Instead of an orderly queue there was a general melee of vehicles. Being British, we politely joined at the back, but were surprised when the ways parted in front of us and the locals effectively waved us through to the front of the "queue", with a huge French overland expedition truck following behind us. The manager of the cafe on the Russian side appeared and asked to have a look at our car and practise his English with us. Then suddenly the gate into the first cage opened and we were sucked into the system. The Russian exit formalities were actually quite straightforward. They had a cursory look inside the car, peered under it with mirrors, asked for a few boxes to be opened for inspection and then lost interest. We had declared our mobile phones and the satellite phone on our entrance customs declaration, and they wanted to see them to make sure we had not sold them in Russia. That made me a bit nervous because one of the phones was of course the rather bulky satellite phone. To my surprise, however, this caused no problem at all - the Customs Officer just looked at it and said "Sputnik?" then nodded.
The whole process on the Mongolian side had a feeling of affable chaos about it - there was no sense of underlying malice or irritation as there had been with the Russians before. It was like a huge guessing game when you just had to keep on collecting pieces of paper, giving some of them away in exchange for others, and hope that you would find the key in the end. After two and a half hours of this, they decided we had gone through enough pain and let us through - so a total of four and a half hours, compared to seven and a half hours to get into Russia - we regarded that as a result! At one point in the process, we fell into conversation with a Mongolian chap a couple of cars ahead of us. He was a dog breeder from UB called Bimba, and he was on his way back home from Moscow with a couple of German Shepherd Dogs he had bought. He was horrified at the thought that we might end up in UB with no real plan about where to stay, so he said we must come and park our vehicle in the yard around his house. We may well take him up on that offer! He gave us his mobile number and his wife's, so that once we were through Customs, we could call him if we needed help. As we left the border post, we were mobbed by money changers, and decided to change a small amount of Euros into Togrogs - it had not been possible to get any Mongolian currency before then. So we were at least able to buy fuel to get us to UB. Mongolia, finally! After we had been through all this, we stopped for a breather and to repack the car just outside town. Richard also wanted to get all the gadgets out which we had been keeping safely locked away whilst in Russia (it is very unclear how legal it is to use GPS there, for instance). Almost immediately a small gang of young boys appeared from nowhere, smiling broadly and saying "Hello, my name is...." and they gave us a rousing "Goodbye" when we did finally set off. All very different from Russia. We were being tooted by lots of the cars we met on the road, and we were a bit worried we might be doing something wrong - but pretty soon it became clear from the cheery waves that went with the horns that it was just people saying "Hello and Welcome", which was nice. We started to see herds of goats, sheep and cows along the road, and people on horses - loads of them, aged anything from 6 to 70. They would all give you a smile and a wave, without charging anything! We stopped off at Darkhan, an industrial town half way to UB. It was Saturday evenng and the locals were out in force doing a promenade and visiting a couple of big statues on neighbouring hills - one of Gingis Khan and one of the Buddha. It was strange to see folk in designer clothes walking clockwise round a prayer wheel as if it was perfectly normal, but that is the kind of thing that happens here. As we were heading back to the car, a middle aged lady grabbed us both to give us some kind of local greeting, to the approval of her friends. We do stand out a bit, as facial hair is almost unheard of here, and ginger even more so! The scenery as we drove south towards UB was spectacular. Huge open valleys and rolling mountains all around as far as the eye can see, with skies which are even bigger than those of Siberia. We decided to turn off the near-deserted road and try our first wild camping in Mongolia. We drove offroad (well, along some very faint tracks, anyway) up a small valley and over some hills onto a shoulder which looked over empty grassy valleys and slopes for miles in every direction. Then we stopped the car and drank it all in. There were one or two mossies, but they were very friendly and polite Mongolian ones which didn't bite and could take a hint from a lit mosquito coil. The only vegetation we could see was grass and low plants. And the only noise we could hear (apart from the wind) was the birds. Very pretty LBJ's which would suddenly fly up from their nests on the ground singing, flit upwards for a bit then dart around before coming back to rest on the ground. Frankly, it was enchanting and a huge boost after the stresses of the journey across Russia. We are now really excited about our next 6 weeks or so here. It was a real pleasure to climb into the tent in an orderly fashion rather than dive in and zip up as quick as possible. Then a huge rainstorm appeared out of nowhere and washed it all clean for tomorrow. The thunder and lightning didn't come too close, and the rain didn't come through the tent at all, so that was no problem, and in some ways quite a nice way to end a really good day. So this evening we are truly relaxing at GPS ref.N 49° 04' 48.48" E 106° 01' 48.95" PS - LBJ = Little Brown Jobby, pretty much the only sort of bird I can identify (apart from Robins and Snow Buntings). And unfortunately we could not get any GPRS reception to try the update tonight and the sat phone was playing up. Hopefully a bumper update tomorrow! PPS - LBD = Little Black Dress. Much more interesting. 9th JulyOur first full day in Mongolia. The rain had gone and we had a lazy start to the day, with only 100 miles or so to drive. We found the fridge had let us down in the night, so no fresh milk for breakfast. We didn't even mind the dried stuff. Mongolia was just as beautiful this morning, with lots of white puffy clouds and a pleasantly cool temperature. And hardly any bugs - except some ants you wouldn't want to mess with, but they can't fly, so no worries there. We ambled our way into UB, enjoying the scenery and the general feel of the place. We saw loads of gers dotted around, and horsemen ambling around everywhere, even in the villages along the road - it looked a bit like the old wild west with stetson hatted ranch hands hitching their horses up outside shops, or just stopping to chat to each other on horseback. The UB traffic was crazy, though. This is the first place we have been where people actually ignore red lights if they don't think they're necessary/appropriate. Richard soon got into the swing of the local rules. It's how driving should be, make up your own rules and make everyone else follow them because you are in a tank of a car. The only time this doesn't work is when some smart arse in a Hummvee comes along and thinks he is bigger than you just because he has bullet proof windows. It's a bit like Irkutsk, only with a bit more liveliness and a bit less stolid aggression. We stopped to stock up on bread, water and other essentials at a small supermarket we spotted on the road into town, then we headed for a pizza at a restaurant in our Lonely Planet guide. It was very good, but the prices seem to have gone up a bit! We also managed to change some travellers cheques, so we are sorted for local currency for a while now - quite a surprise to see banks open for business on Sunday, but apparently they are open 24 hours! Then we managed to contact Eamonn Thornton, the manager of the Christina Noble Foundation Mongolian Children's projects. He told us a bit more about the work they do here and was very welcoming and helpful, buying us a beer in the centre of town and giving us all sorts of useful advice and help. He is an Irishman with an interesting story who is married to a Mongolian woman. We will be seeing more of him soon, especially when Geraldine arrives to join us. He explained to us how property ownership is a bit unusual here - essentially none of the land is owned but anyone can set up a compound with a low fence around it wherever they can find a space and build themselves a house or ger there and then its theirs. If anyone tries to grab too much land, the fences tend to "fall down" - Mongolians it seems have a bit of a dislike for fences except when absolutely necessary! We kept him chatting longer than we should have, and didn't head out of UB to camp until far too late, so we ended up mixing up the instructions Eamonn had given us about where to camp, and finally ended up in a random spot not very far off the road and only about 10 miles out fron the city. We should have learnt that lesson by now! But that stifling heat has gone and it is now pleasantly cool in the tent at night. So tonight we are mostly just ever so slightly kicking ourselves at GPS ref N 47° 43' 46.45" E 106° 49' 09.53", about ten miles south of UB (and an altitude of 1,465 metres, apparently!) |
