In which Chris goes to the Gobi.
Heading south, it felt as if the world was falling away from us (myself and the four Israelis: Gil, Gili, Rotem and Sigal). The city passed and with it, the road. The track took us slowly upwards, houses gradually disappearing until there was nothing but green hills that rose and fell into the distance and wind that whistled a freshness and freedom that has to be felt to be imagined. Our excited chatter died away too, leaving just a sense of silence and emptiness as we each were absorbed into our own reveries, contemplating the beauty of the landscape and thinking of our adventures ahead.
We drove south through scenery that hardly changed the whole day. Very gently rolling grassland continued for as far as you could imagine. As we crested one slight rise, imagining somehow that the next view would be different, we were perpetually surprised by the sameness. Lunch was taken in the shadow of the van, flatness and stillness to the horizon. Towards evening we began to reach more undulating hills, marked by dry river beds that forced us to slow right to a crawl before launching over the edge, then bumping over gravel and rocks before launching up again, nothing ahead but empty blue sky. Our driver would take one ‘road’ (Mongolia reputedly has 50,000km of ‘roads’, but only 2,000 of these are paved: the rest varied from ‘decent farm track’ to ‘impassable river bed’) then he’d veer one way before changing his mind, veer back again and strike off across country, bumping and rattling our teeth until we swerved onto an identical track heading in a slightly different direction. Road signs simply don’t exist and overtaking just means speeding up instead of slowing when you decide to leave the track.
Towards evening we made just one heroic switch onto another, seemingly identical track, when the was an enormous crunch and our van tilted precipitously to the right. Our driver half-skidded to a halt and we tumbled out to inspect. One day in and we’d already lost a wheel (not a flat tyre, the bolts had sheared and the wheel actually fell off). So that was how it was going to be. We stretched, looked about us and resigned ourselves to waiting while our driver fixed it. We only found three replacement bolts, but that didn’t deter our intrepid driver from hurtling on at ever greater speeds (In the Gobi, we averaged around 60km/h, hitting over 100 on one flat stretch. In the centre and north, we usually averaged 30 the roads were so bad.) Our first night was incredible, camped amongst the rocks near an ancient monastery, a huge, perfect sky draped over us, shot through with shooting stars and countless constellations. It was beautiful.
The next day took us into the real desert. Rolling green grass gave way to flat rocky plains with tufts of straggly grasses and small but determined-looking bushes. Groups of camels began to appear amongst the mixed herds of sheep and goats and groups of horses that we drove through (this would consist of our driver hurtling towards said herd, before honking the horn vehemently and if they still didn’t move, crashing to a halt inches from the prone and idiotic beast lying in our way). We camped near an oasis close to Bayanzag (the Flaming Cliffs, made famous by the dinosaur discoveries of Roy Chapman Andrews, the 1920s palaeontologist, adventurer and supposed inspiration for Indiana Jones) , a campfire of dried dung and thorny saxaul shrubs burning fiercely as we watched the sunset over the desert. Sadly, though, our baked potato experiment failed: they weren’t ready when we decided to head to bed, so we thought we’d live them in the embers until morning, by which time, of course, they’d become deformed black husks of burnt-out potatoes.
Bayanzag was impressive, all scorched red rocks and dry wind whistling up the between the outcrops, but there was little reason to stay long. Around mid-afternoon we reached our first National Park – Gurvan Saikhan National Park – where we spent the afternoon exploring Yoliin Am, the famous ice gorge. A four kilometre walk takes you through a gorge that gradually narrows and rises until you stand in a narrow river bed with cliffs towering far above you on both sides. It’s cool in the gorge and there’s ice there almost all year round, though we found only a couple of blocks a few metres square. Wallcreepers and snow finches abounded, whilst vultures soared overhead as we picnicked and washed in the river. We took the “adventurous and rough alternative route” (according to the guidebook anyway) west, through the Dugany Am, a river gorge (it wasn’t dried up, the river still ran) so narrow I honestly thought the van would be too wide. Of course it wasn’t (our driver had obviously done this before), but it was so narrow that we had to fold in the wing mirrors and then once in the narrow section, we wouldn’t have been able to open the doors to get out. It was probably the coolest bit of off-roading I’ve ever seen.
We camped high on a hill, next to a small stupa with a couple of gers belonging to a herder and his family. We looked out down over an enormous plain and as we ate dinner, supplemented with öröm from the ger, we watched herds of goats and horses sweep past in clouds of settling dust, rounded up by the malchin (herder) on his traditional Mongolia wooden saddle and dressed in his del (a thick, warm long coat worn by almost everyone outside of the city). It was perhaps the most Mongolian of evenings imaginable.
We reached Khongoryn Els the next day: true sand dunes stretched over an area 100 kilometres long and twenty wide. The highest ones were over 200m high and towered over the flat scrubby steppe below, baking in the heat. We rode camels from the Ger camp where we stayed (the little stream nearby was too shallow and too muddy to use for camping) to the base of the dunes, and then struggled up to the first ridgeline, swathed in headscarves and lathered in suncream. We spent two nights in the Ger camp at the base of the dunes and then turned right and headed north.
Not, however, before the biggest scare I had on the whole. Camped for our last night in the Gobi on the edge of the national park, I went to the loo (a phrase that eternally delighted the Israelis with their American English) and, as was our practise, unthinkingly set fire to the toilet paper. Almost immediately a small tuft of dry grass went up in flames and, fanned by the warm breeze, spread to the next tuft and beyond. In the fractions of a second elapsed by the time the third tuft had caught, I had realised the danger of the situation, visions of the entire hillside of dry grass going up and engulfing the tents (and our driver sleeping in the van) and I shouted for help. As the fire started to spread, I somehow, and very luckily, reacted quickly, whipping off one of my flip-flops and beating like a maniac and swearing at the area of spreading fire (now a metre or two square). By the time Gil had arrived I’d all but put it out and was just beating the last of the embers. As I sat down and the adrenaline passed I realised how close I’d come to starting a serious fire: the conditions were perfect, the grass tinder dry and stretching uninterrupted all the way to the plain below and the wind a gentle and warm fan for the flames. In retrospect I’ve come to view it as perhaps my finest hour in all my trip, after all, how many can say they very nearly set fire to a Mongolian National Park whilst going to the toilet one night?
