We’ve now left Ulaanbaatar and are Russia-bound.  The border is just over the hill.

We enjoyed our time in UB immensely.  A few nights we headed out of town with Pete, who runs the excellent Café Amsterdam, and his girlfriend, Sarah, a VSO volunteer.  We’d find a river and have a swim and a BBQ.  During one such excursion to the Terej National Park we had to cross a large river, which was flowing in several channels.

On the way in we scouted it carefully and checked there were no deep sections.  Beside one section there was a Land Cruiser parked up and all the cars contents drying on branches.  They’d obviously got stuck in the middle somehow.  On our return Peter (Lovell) took a slightly different route.
Half way across the car took a nose dive into a big hole in the river bed.
Water surged over the bonnet and half way up the windscreen.  Pete floored it and Roxy somehow powered through without stopping.  Amazing, especially as we’d been told whatever you do, don’t get the water over the bonnet!

Whilst Pete was recovering from his tonsillitis Dave and I headed out of town with Dochka, our translator, to do a case study.  We rocked up at nomadic family and were invited into their ger.

Inside the Ger

The subject of the case study, a 64-year-old mother of ten had been forced to move from the far west of Mongolia by the changing climate.  The case study is probably our best yet, especially as climate change has such potential to heavily impact the traditional nomadic lifestyle here.

We got the problems we’d had with the Landy in the Gobi fixed, at least enough to get us to Japan (fingers crossed) and Pete over his tonsillitis we finally escaped UB yesterday.  Obviously, we struggled to find the correct road out of the city and took a very scenic but not particularly speedy route out of the city.

We camped up high on a col with a terrific view.  As darkness set in we were treated to a full 360 degree display of lightning storms, whilst the sky above was cloud free.

We’d just called it a night and we about to drift off to sleep when the wind started to pick up and the mother of all storms hit our camp.  Our tents collapsed under the Gale Force winds and Pete in particular was beaten  down inside his tent by the poles.  Efforts to shore up the guylines were fairly futile and one by one we retreated to the Land Rover.  As I got out of my tent the pegs gave up their tentative grip on the rocky ground and the tent wrapped itself around me.  After a few minutes wrestling it I managed to pin it down with the table and some rocks as the rain poured down on me.

We sat in the Landy and had a game of cards until the storm abated and we ventured outside to re-erect our sopping tents and attempt to get some sleep, praying another storm wouldn’t hit.

Morning Camp Visitor
Today we drove to within spitting distance of the border, stopping at a bow and arrow factory to see the traditional method of making the beautiful Mongolian bows.  Next time you hear from us we should’ve reached Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world (hopefully Pete won’t try to ford it!).

Many thanks to everyone in UB who made our stay so much fun.  If you have a copy of the UB Post or the Mongol Messenger newspapers to hand you can read all about it.

- Spike

Playing on the iPod: “Shelter from the Storm” by Bob Dylan

Police Stop Count: 24 (including two within 30 minutes when Pete decided to break some Mongolian traffic laws)

The relative quiet on the blog recently has reflected our status as adventurers in limbo. We have been shacked up in UB sorting out repairs to Roxanne and doing various admin stuff before we can set off again. This had all pretty much been taken care of when Pete rather carelessly decided to contract tonsilitis, so we’ve arranged visa extensions and will stay until he is back at full strength. An ill Pete is a most unnatural thing to behold; he doesn’t eat very much and his favourite maxim “Pedro’s a legend” has not been heard in days. We all look forward to him getting back on his feet.

In the meantime we have been embraced into the expat community in UB and must have met every volunteer in the city! It’s a slightly surreal episode of the expedition but gives us good access to translators for our research. We’ve also met some fantastic people through the G4 challenge and their links to the Red Cross - our night with the journalists we’d met in the desert being particularly memorable!

Since we’ve been stationary for a while you might like to have a look at some people on the move at http://minivanmongolrally.wordpress.com/ - I came across these guys through Steve Smith, one of the team members, who is arranging our shipping from Japan to Vancouver. The team and his company (Japan Car Exports) are raising a fantstic amount of money for Hope International, and we aim to meet up with them and compare stories at Halifax. A long way to go yet…

- David

The morning after the birthday beers we were rudely awakened by the sun slowly cooking us in the tents and so made an early start. 6 hours driving through some amazing canyons and rocky plains we managed to find the Gobi’s largest sand dunes.

In our usual fashion we decided to head through the dunes to the base of the largest one and then climb it, so with Spike at the wheel we set off. Unfortunately it turns out sand is a little softer than rock and in the first valley we got stuck. Although we could move we could not get up enough speed to get up the sides. This prompted us to us the sand ladders for what they where designed for and we made slow progress up the sides. This was very tedious and then, like all great ideas, inspiration came from Mr Clarkson and the Top Gear guys. We let all the air out of the tires (like they did crossing the snow in the Arctic) and low and behold we positively flew up the side and we were out.

This then prompted an afternoon of driving around the dunes having a huge amount of fun. two of us would run ahead and plot the route, whilst doing front flips and superman dives off the steep, soft dunes at the same time.

We finally made it up the highest dune and back out to the edge of the sand by about 10.00 at night. The big drops off each dune started to be hard to spot so we called it a night and planned a quick dinner and then bed. Unfortunately we had to finish off the lamb stew, now five days old. I have never finished a plate of food and been physically shaking, it was the worst thing we have eaten so far. With the consistency of canned tuna and a smell of dog food, the experience on the tongue made you wretch every mouthful. But we all kept it down and hit the sack with the prospect of a long days driving back to UB the next day.

Now things start to get interesting, we could not have made this next bit up. It started with Dave getting up when his alarm went off for the first time on the expedition. Normally we get up about an hour after we wanted to but this time we where packed up and moving by 8.30. I was at the wheel and having a lot of fun on the sand tracks when we took a turn to cross the dunes. Around the next corner we nearly drove in to three bright orange Land Rovers. The guys from the G4 Challenge were there doing press shoots (G4 is the premier off road adventure challenge run by Land Rover). They where very happy to see us and invited us back to the their camp of a cup of tea, so off we went. It was about a 5 minute drive and in those five minutes Roxy lost all power. The engine was coughing and kept wanting to stall, and in this state we limped in to the Camp.

Let me just set the scene properly. We were in the least populated part of the world least populated country, we came across a Land Rover team and where driving in to their camp (hidden from the road so we would have driven straight past) and we had our first mechanical problem in 11500 miles of off road driving. As we where driving in one of the G4 staff apparently said “I recognise that car, I built it”! So not only did we have a fully trained Land Rover mechanic on hand, he already knew the vehicle. Out came the laptop and the fault was quickly diagnosed. It turned out that if we had carried on driving the engine would have cut out and not started again, the mechanic said we have less than ten miles before we broke down and would not be able to move again. He also said the fault was a broken wire and would be nearly impossible to find, but he would have a go, the first cut through the insulation and he found the break. After a little bit of soldering all was good and we were ready to move.

With some boil in the bag meals and other goodies we set off with a working Land Rover. Some people said that we where really luck to win this bursary, and we always maintained it was through hard work, but after that little event may be that luck is traveling with us. Unfortunately after about an hours driving we started getting mild power loss again. At this point we had left the G4 team well behind and we still in the middle of the desert, if we broke down here it would be a 5 day wait for the G4 guys to come back past and even then they might not have had the part required, so we had a choice. Should we push on through the night to UB nursing the car and try and get it to a garage before the weekend, or do we take it slow and stop to let the engine cool every time the symptoms of the problem started (it was to do with a valve sticking when the turbo got hot)? We decided to drive to UB through the night trying to use the turbo as little as possible. This sounds easy, but Mongolian tracks are no place for an under-powered car.

With a final diesel stop we headed off in to the darkness with our spotlights showing the way, things where not to bad as the cool night air kept the engine from getting too hot. The only problem was when she cut out and we had to turn the ignition off and on again. With switching off the ignition the lights go off too, so do the brakes and so does the power stierring, driving becomes interesting with no lights. But despite this we managed to push on through the night stopping for some very welcome instant meals courtesy of the G4 guys and to watch a stunning sun rise.

Amazingly the car carried on going and as we got more used to driving, feathering the throttle and using the clutch to coast we nearly stopped noticing the problem. As we approached UB with Dave passed out in the back, Spike and I noticed a strange sound coming for the back left wheel. On closer inspection we found that somehow we had broken the brake disc guard. This involved a quick wheel off, guard off, wheel on again and finally we made it in to the town at about 3 in the afternoon. We had managed to drive a very sick vehicle 800km on terrible tracks in 30 hours, tired but happy we could now start to sort things out.

The main north-south road in Mongolia

We are meeting the G4 fixers tonight and should be able to get things fixed at the beginning of next week. If not then we could be in for a long wait while some new parts are sent out. Roxy is an amazing car, we take her all sorts of places and probably drive her very badly (i.e. my meeting with a certain tree) but she just keeps going, however Mongolia is no easy place to live for a car and the list of faults is as follows.

• Broken roof rack (every stanchion is cracked and it is being held on by paint)
• The rear diff is leaking oil
• The turbo can not maintain pressure
• Spare tire is flat
• Wing mirror is broken
• The ABS has stopped working
• The brake light keeps coming on while we are driving (not sure why so ideas are welcome)

Despite all this we have managed to keep going and should be able to get all the medicine to cure our baby in the city, I might even have managed to fix the turbo problem today. We are off to meet the G4 people now, but want to thank Asif (the mechanic) and all the G4 guys, you really saved us on thursday morning, enjoy the desert and I hope we will catch up with you all again soon.

- Pete

Playing on the iPod: “The Luckiest” by Ben Folds

Too cool to miss
After we finally dragged ourselves from UB we started on the long road south to the Gobi desert.  Now I know that some of you will have looked at maps and noticed that the Gobi is not necessarily very prevalent at fifty degrees north, but don’t worry we’d also noticed this.  The fiftieth guides our route, and provides the locations for our case studies but there’s certainly a fair bit of freedom in our route otherwise - and the Gobi’s just too cool to miss!

So anyway, we eventually found the ‘road’ - we’ve had problems navigating out of towns ever since we hit Kazakhstan; regardless how small the town might be they always manage to conceal the exits, so we usually just drive by GPS and fumble around in no-mans land for a bit til we find a track.
This time no-mans land was occupied by lots of rubbish dumps which stunk to high heaven, but that’s by the by, we found the track and it was a pretty good one.

We decided to make a call on some locals
As the sun began to get tired we decided to make a call on some locals, so pulled over to a likely looking ger and said ‘hello, do you mind if we camp here?’ then flushed with the success of our opening gambit we said ‘can we buy a sheep?’.  Yes, that’s right, we bought a sheep.  But not just any sheep, oh no, we got to choose our sheep from their increasingly worried flock.  This involved encircling said beasts alongside the majority of the family (who seemed as equally amused by the situation as us!) until one of them (or on one occasion Spike) made a frantic grabbing foray.  This highly sophisticated method led us to our brief association with Paul the sheep.
Sadly Paul wasn’t much of a conversationalist, so after money had been transferred one of our newfound human friends slit his chest open and pulled out his heart.

A bonnet full of lamb
The meat extraction took place with impressive efficiency and soon we had a bonnet completely covered with joints of lamb (after politely declining the head, entrails and skin).  Team Latitude is fond of its food, but even we realised this might be a tricky prospect when we were heading for a few days in desert heat, so in the morning we stewed as much as we could and left a few more titbits with our hosts.

We printed some photos
We arrived in the Gobi accompanied by rain (shurely shome mishtake?) and saw lots of river beds - if someone could check the desert status of the Gobi that would be great!  The scenery was stunning though, with stony plains surrounded by jutting peaks and rolling red mounds.

A Memorable Birthday:  lamb, with beer

That night we grilled up some ribs of (yes you’ve guessed it) lamb over the fire which we’d surrounded by volcanic rocks with a tendency to explode slightly!  But we survived to drive another day, which also happened to be Spike’s birthday, and I think it may have been a memorable one.

After a day of fantastically fun driving with a few dunes and an incident leaving the wing mirror in a tree (ask Pete) we set up camp in a vast plain, coincidentally in the same place as I got a puncture…  We had gin and tonics while the sun set and followed it with a curry (well, curried lamb stew!) and some chocolate hobnobs - perfect!

- David

I think we’re alone now
Playing on the iPod: ‘I think we’re alone now’ by Tiffany

Birthday Addendum

Quite a few people probably have a curry and a couple of beers with some mates on their birthday.  But I doubt many do it in the least populated part of the least populated country on the planet.  I also doubt I’ll have a more memorable birthday any time soon.  Driving through the sand dunes and enjoying complete freedom are two of the best birthday presents.  Many thanks to all my family and friends who sent me messages yesterday.  It was hugely appreciated.

- Spike

We drove in to Ulaanbaatar (or just UB) and the rain just kept on coming. The traffic, something we hadn’t seen for a long time, was terrible and every other junction had a small car crash on it. UB is nothing like the rest of Mongolia - there’s cars, high buildings, traffic lights and even people! Common sense was in short supply amongst the Mongolia drivers and the whole city centre was gridlocked. After driving around in circles very slowly for several hours we eventually happened upon a lovely hostel. We dined out on Korean food that night and had a few beers, culminating in hunting for an open Karaoke bar at 2am.

The next day we visited the embassy and met with Peter, the Deputy Head of Mission there, who gave us a few tips about the city. We then hit the Black Market where you can buy pretty much anything, but we all decided that we didn’t really want anything that they had, least of all a tshirt with a terribly translated English saying on it. We nearly got pick-pocketed about 10 times with groups of men barging into you and heavily thrusting their hand into your pocket. However they were all terrible at it and we repeatedly thwarted their attempts.

That night we took part in the pub quiz at a traveller’s haunt and were taken out on the town by another Pete, who’s just set up a cracking cafe here called Cafe Amsterdam. If any of you are passing through UB anytime soon we can recommend their coffee and sandwiches.

On Friday it was the first day of Nadaam, a big festival which is the highlight of the Mongolia sporting calendar. The three sports played are wrestling, archery and horse racing. We loved watching the archers, who were exceptionally accurate at knocking down a pile of little wicker baskets 75m away. Alarmingly a group of people stood around each pile of baskets to put them up again, but once in a while a stray arrow took one of them out. Luckily the arrows had rubber tips but it still seemed to hurt.

We managed to get into the stadium for free and watched some wrestling. It was the preliminary rounds and with no weight categories to speak of it seemed to be big, fat wrestlers consistently beating wirey, lanky ones!  That evening we dusted our suits off and headed along for drinks at the embassy.  We had a pint with George who runs a big catering firm and has very kindly offered to give us with a cool box full of gourmet delights such as English sausages and marinated steaks!  I’m salivating at the thought of it, many thanks George.

Umbrella seller at the Nadaam Festival

We were planning to head out of UB today, but it’ll probably be tomorrow now.  We’re off to the Gobi to explore the desert and drive up some sand dunes.

- Spike

Having left Moron we decided to spend a few days driving along the line, slowly making our way towards UlaanBaatar. Northern Mongolia is stunningly beautiful, but not what we had expected at all. It is like driving through Switzerland, with the addition of an unbelievable number of flies. Whilst driving through this sort of scenary is nice, the flies made stopping pretty unpleasant and the forest made the driving pretty much impossible. So at the end of the first day we decided that we would make our way back to the road and drive straight to the capital for the Nadaam festival. We could have continued along the line, but all the sawing and moving of logs sounded like to much hard work and would have taken too long. We did give three random kids a lift from their ger down to the river, after finding a good fording point we drove across the river and left the kids there. We were slightly worried how they were going to make it back home 10km away, but they seemed fairly unfussed about the whole thing.

That night we stopped at the top of one of the hills to camp and had the most amazing view over the valley below.

As night came the flies went to bed and suddenly the magic of Mongolia was back, we enjoyed a curry and chapatis over an open fire with the mist filled valleys glowing silver in the moon light. This nearly made us change our minds about going straight to UB but in the morning the flies where back and we jumped in the car to start the two day drive to civilization.

The driving that day was pretty easy and uneventful and we got back to the road and made some good miles. A quick lunch stop at a cafe involved 12 deep fried pasty things, it would have been nice to have something else but that was all the cafe served. After the danger (unidentified meat) pastys we appreciated Dave’s cooking even more and had a nice dinner with a view of more stunning valleys.

The next day things got a bit more interesting. We were back in the barren empty Mongolia everyone imagines and enjoyed some more breathtaking scenery.

Driving along quite happily we suddenly came across a police check point, very unusual in Mongolia and we then picked up two more police stops. We later found out we had driven through a gold mine and a highly restricted area, but fortunately the police just found us funny and pointed the way to UB. It started to rain in the afternoon and it would appear dirt tracks turn in to ice rinks when it rains and i had a 4 hour driving stint doing some of the most difficult but fun driving so far. There was a lot of sideways action and every few seconds a water splash would completely blind me for a while.

These where interesting and it was always a bit of a gamble to see if you emerged still facing the way you where moving. That night somehow we found a gap in the clouds and managed to set up camp in the dry and got a good nights sleep, just around the corner from an eagle’s nest (of the non-Nazi type), complete with a very ugly eagle chick.

The last 100km to UB should have been easy as the track took on some semblance of a road, but as with most of the roads we have found it was better to drive on the track off to the side, so Dave had a whole morning of controlled sliding. At one point we where fully sideways and all producing brown adrenalin, but the rest of the time it was actually general pretty controlled. Then something happened to make us all very happy. We came across a Land Cruiser stuck in the mud. People have always asked us if we would prefer a Land Cruise as they are more comfortable etc, but they are rubbish off road and it was a lot of fun towing this one out. It was made even better when we snapped the Toyota issue tow cable and had to use our own.

We spent the morning stopping to help people out of the mud and even tried to help a ten tonne truck that drove into exactly the same pot hole we had just pulled the Land Cruiser out of. I have to say i would never drive through this country in anything but a Land Rover everything else seemed to get stuck and we (except for the sideways incident) had no problems at all.

So we arrived in UB at about lunchtime and then drove round the city for 3 hours trying to blag our way in to all the nice hotels. This did not go so well and we ended up in a really cool guest house to chill out and take in the sights of Mongolia’s only city.

- Pete

Playing on the iPod: Anything by Wet Wet Wet

Police Stop Count: 22

We wrote this blog in Eastern Kazakhstan (surprising, huh?) and for one reason and another it never made got uploaded.  Here it is:

Having been entertained by the embassy staff in Astana (Rhys and Bernie, you are legends thanks for a great night), we headed off towards Karaganda and our next case study. Through some friends from Astana we found two lovely young Kazak ladies (thanks Nastya and Ira we had a great day) to help us with our interviews and had a lot of fun with another crazy farmer.

After this the next stop in Barnaul in Russia via the ex-nuclear testing site at Semey, that should all be easy, we are only entering the most lawless part of Russia. After camping outside Karaganda we set off and had a fairly easy day, the only event was a little bit of black market diesel buying.

So, as we will be leaving Kaz in a couple of days what did we think of it? None of us have ever been anywhere where there is more space, it is truly indescribable, and certainly 1500 miles of western Kazakhstan is totally featureless. They are also not about to run out of wind, people used to get exiled to the Kazakh steppe and apparently the wind drove them crazy. Fortunately we were already pretty crazy, so there has been no perceivable affects. Having said all of that, we have seen some truly stunning countryside and have loved driving through the empty plains.

The food is very different, with some things being very interesting (fizzy alcoholic milk), but most things being fairly plain. We tend to eat a lot of cheese, but that is all there is to say about it, it is just generic cheese.

But the best thing about this country is the people. We were told lots of horror stories and every one we spoke to said “take a gun”. They could not have been more wrong. Everyone we have met has been amazingly friendly (except the cheeky little …. who stole my phone). We have very little Russian, and never know where we are going or exactly what we are looking for, but people will always help us, even as far as driving 200 miles with us so we did not get lost. It has been an amazing experience and we want to thank everyone we met. It would be great to come back in 5 years time to see how things have changed, there is a lot of money here and it will be interesting to see what they do with it.

We will probably talk to you next from Russia, if we get in!

- Pete

There’s nothing apocalyptic about this entry, or even any ponies, but the name tickled me.  We’ve spent the last couple of days by Lake Hovsgul in northern Mongolia, the second deepest lake in Asia apparently (behind Baikal, which we visit shortly).  After our previous exploits in Mongolia the lake came as a shock to us: there were signs in English, souvenir shops, tourist camps, our first impressions were that it was a bit like a Mongolia theme park.  I think we’ve become travel snobs because we all got righteously indignant about the prospect of camping in designated zones and having other westerners around.

This faded soon enough though as in true expedition fashion we got Roxanne stuck in some mud.  It was highly embarrassing given that we were only 50m from the road, but we attracted the assistance of a group of locals and learnt some interesting Mongolian methods for vehicle extraction!  These guys were very friendly, and after we gave them some whisky and photos in thanks they insisted we should camp by their house and even gave us a bag of freshly caught fish in the morning.

We indulged in a little tourism by taking a horse ride beside the lake and into surrounding mountains, hence the title of the blog.  The horses were definitely horses, not ponies, but were pretty small, and since we were all a bit rubbish we thought that pony was appropriate.  Our young guide was definitely not rubbish though - he was an excellent horseman, and infinitely cooler than us, he then was ‘Death’.  Pete on his trusty steed Timmy took the mantle of ‘Famine’ (anyone aware of Pete’s appetite will see the irony), whilst I snapped up ‘Pestilence’ for myself and my white wonder Honky, and Spike seemed quite pleased to take ‘War’ for himself and Hotter (a name actually based on the horse’s real name ridiculously).  It was a fun few hours anyway, culminating in a beautiful commando roll descent from Pete as Timmy tripped on a particularly tricky bit of flat ground.

The lake itself is beautiful with stunningly clear water, and we spent many hours happily skimming stones and taking freezing cold dips on a deserted pebble beach (with the most amazing selection of skimming stones!).  We were also quite keen to leave though, since we are rather fond of the road less travelled and there is just so much beautiful scenery to see in this country.

We paused on our way from the lake to watch some traditional wrestling, which was great fun and I think we all fancy giving it a crack!

Who needs a GPS?

We stopped in the town of Moron (sic) for a restock, after giving a tow to a van on the road into town (Land Rover to the rescue!). In town we noticed a hotel called 50 degrees 100 degrees reminding us where we are, and just how far we have to go.  What a wonderful journey it is.

- David

Playing on the iPod:  ‘The Gambler’ by Kenny Rogers

Roxy making good progress on gravel tracks.

We’ve spent the last few days driving up from Altai mountains to the north of Mongolia.  The scenery has been fantastic throughout.  We all agree we like Mongolia the most out of all the countries we’ve visited so far.

The landscape is out of this world, there’s hardly any towns and the people are so friendly and curious.

Man without petrol

Most of the people live in Gers (or Yurts in Russian), a large tent and they are predominantly herdsmen with sheep, goats or cows.

There’s not really any roads in this country. “Main” roads are nothing more than a collection of tracks between a couple of towns a few hundred kilometres apart.  The driving has definitely got a lot more interesting since we entered Mongolia.

Today has been our first day of bad weather since leaving England.  Numerous times I looked out of the window and it could’ve been mistaken for Dartmoor.
We headed from our last night’s camp toward Hatgal, a journey of about 150km as the crow flies.

Roxy looking a little dirty after a mudbath - Dave wasn’t much cleaner!

We took several wrong turns - very easy when there’s no road signs, road surface or even accurate mapping - and ended up in some impressive gorges, with no way out.  In the end we only covered about 80km.

Our neighbours who came and visited us one morning. I talked to them a bit with hand signals and our Mongolian phrasebook. A traditional greeting is to ask them if their animals are fattening up nicely, which I did.

We’ve just eaten a delicious plate of fish and potato curries that Dave cooked up - one of his best meals to date, possibly surpassed by his tapas selection.  It’s started to rain again so we’ve abandoned the fire to play cards and savour a couple of squares of Dairy Milk which has come all the way from England.

We’ve heard through the Sat Phone that some of the Mongolians in Ulaanbaatar are a bit less chilled out than the ones we’ve met so far.  Any further information and updates on the riots would be much appreciated (just click on ‘contact’).  We’ll be down there in just over a week.

- Spike

Playing on the iPod: “Another day in Paradise” by Phil Collins

Police stop count: 20 (our latest happened whilst we were parked up.  It seems the Mongolians don’t actually bother stopping you, they just bide their time until you stop)