The Mongol Rally:
Making Like Nomads in Mongolia
The Mongolian border takes time
Mongolia requires patience. Firstly, to get in. Over two hours of waiting to enter the border area. Another few hours to exit Russia. Repeat the process on the Mongolian side: queue, inspection, passport control, customs, stamp, stamp, stamp.
Seven hours after reaching the border, we were finally deemed to have jumped through enough hoops and were allowed in. The saying that ‘patience is a virtue’ had never felt more apt.
The slow-moving queue to enter Mongolia at the Tsagaannuur-Tashanta border crossing
Travel in Mongolia is slow going
Once inside, you must be patient with your travel. It can’t be rushed. Mongolia is vast, and while it has some stretches of immaculate new tarmac, much of the country has no real roads to speak of. Combined with being in a car unsuited to off-road driving, this results in a very long, slow journey across the country to Ulaanbaatar, the capital.
A Mongolian ‘road’ with a river crossing
Slow but beautiful. It took us five days to cross the country, from the north-west corner to Ulaanbaatar. Five days through a moody landscape of bare hills and gathering rain clouds. Our first proper rain since we left the UK came in waves each day. The clouds seemingly favoured the rough-edged towns where we stopped for supplies, our arrival invariably greeted by a torrential downpour. We became adept at dodging the mega-puddles in the poorly drained streets to reach the shop or bank.
Keeping ahead of the rain in Mongolia, for now
Getting into the nomadic groove
The routine was the same each day: wake up with the sun, drive through the day, and stop in time to cook before dark. Always wild camping on the steppe. Just turn off the road and choose your pitch. Mongolia has no farms or villages to get in the way; just keep a respectful distance from the nearest Ger (Mongolian yurt). There is plenty of space.
Our ‘room with a view’ on the Mongolian steppe
In this manner, the days merged and intertwined. The time and the date lost their relevance. The passing of the sun and the ever-changing landscape were all we needed. A landscape that changed from broody mountains with snow-capped peaks through vast empty plains and sandy deserts to rich river-fed pastures, all within a day.
Mongolia is a country of contrasts
The lushest of valleys, full of Gers and nomads with their flocks, could quickly turn to the driest of deserts. The perfect asphalt road would suddenly turn to a multitude of rocky tracks, diverging and covering at random. Navigation was difficult. In the morning, a landscape full of camels, yaks, sheep, goats, horses, cows, and even camels, all grazing together amongst their owner’s encampments. By the evening, rocky hills and dry grassland, with no animals or humans in sight.
From mountains
To sandy desert
And grassy plain
The best of roads
Followed by no road
While these scenes merged and interchanged, devoid of an obvious sequence in our minds, a few events did stand out amongst the stark beauty of the Mongolian steppe;
1. Hosting a Mongolian Herder
Our third night’s campsite was a particularly remote pitch, on a rocky hillside overlooking a vast empty plain, the ribbon-like tracks of the road snaking into the distance below. It felt like an especially lonely spot.
So it was a surprise to hear a shout from outside the tent just as we were about to turn our lights out for sleep. Peering into the darkness, we discovered a man on horseback silhouetted against the moonlit sky, long stick in hand, shouting at us. Alone on the steppe, this wasn’t a totally un-intimidating discovery.
As he dismounted and began removing his saddle, it became apparent this nomad wasn’t going any further. Was he lost? Drunk? About to rob us? It turned out he was actually a pretty friendly guy. Hungry, thirsty, but not about to rob us.
In most nomadic cultures, hospitality towards guests is paramount, so we fed and watered him before he bedded down in our tent porch for the night (Rico put his foot down when he tried to climb into our two-person sleeping area with us). The following day, after some jam and bread for breakfast, he trotted off, with his big stick, into the empty steppe whence he had come.
Our nomadic Mongolian guest
2. A night in a Mongolian ger
Karma is a beautiful thing. The following night, as we pulled off the road and down into a side valley, we came across a nomadic herder on his way home with his flock. Beckoning us towards the closest Ger, his family home, we were quickly made to feel at home despite lacking a common language.
Plied with milky tea and dried goat curd (insanely sour but confusingly presented like sweets…I thought it was fudge until the first face-scrunching bite), we were shown our host’s trophies and medals from his Mongolian wrestling days before his wife and daughters arrived home and started dinner.
What appeared to be the lungs were promptly cut from the sheep carcass hanging on one side of the Ger before being boiled in a broth over a sheep-dung stove. The result was delicious, and we both returned for second helpings before more meat was hacked from the sheep’s torso and cooked on the bone.
With everyone’s appetites satisfied, we settled back and conversed as best we could, using our basic phrase book and the occasional phone call to a vaguely English-speaking relative. We eventually drifted off to the sound of the goats shuffling outside and the flicker of candlelight in the family’s small Buddhist shrine.
Inside the Ger; lounge, kitchen, bedroom, and refrigerator
3. Tyre woes in Mongolia
Mongolia’s rough roads gave us our third puncture of the Rally. By this stage, all we had left as replacements were the previously repaired (but untested) tyres from earlier punctures.
After surviving a good portion of a day, the first gave up just before we found our campsite on the second night. With the hole too big for our usual ‘tyre string’ repair, while Rico cooked up a storm, I put my bush mechanic skills to the test. It took a few hours to remove the tyre from the wheel rim, patch the puncture from the inside, replace it, and re-inflate it using a cheeky rope technique I learnt on my bush mechanic course.
Putting the bush-mechanic course to use in Mongolia
Exhausted but feeling more than a little bit pleased with myself, I removed the pump and watched as the tyre gradually deflated again, my ego deflating along with it. The string and patch didn’t work, so I tried again the following night. Tyre off the rim, placing an inner tube was the last resort. It was just as tiring as the previous night, but with everything in place, we finally had a tyre that would stay inflated long-term.
4. Riding a Bactrian camel
On our final day on the road to Ulaanbaatar, we encountered a patch of sand dunes. They looked out of place, almost lost, an island of sand in a sea of green grass. Some enterprising herders were running camel rides out of their family Ger nearby. After an obligatory taste of camel milk in their Ger, we were ready to trade in the zebra for an hour of camel-riding.
Our new rides in Mongolia
Bactrian camels are the large, woolly, two-humped species native to Central Asia and are widely domesticated across Mongolia. They are big but well-behaved, an important fact when the person leading your camel is a small child no older than ten.
While these camels were much more comfortable than the usual one-humped dromedary, we were still happy to get off after an hour and back into the zebra for the rest of the journey to Ulaanbaatar. Our Mongol Rally adventure was drawing to a close.
This Leg
Days: 5
Countries: 1
Distance: 1,256 miles
Time in car: 1 day 16 hours
Total
Days: 49
Countries: 25
Distance: 10,406 miles
Time in car: 12 days 19 hours 30 minutes