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