Admittingly I am not great on group holidays and over the last 5 months I got away without it. However Mongolia is slightly different as it is big, very big, and very much hardly populated except Ulaanbaatar. It has 2.8 million people on 1.5 million square kilometers and is therefore the 19th largest and the most sparsely populated country in the world (1.8 people/sqkm - e.g. Australia has 7.9 people/sqkm while Bangladesh has 1033!). There are basically two public buses, one to Dalanzadgad in the Gobi and one to Moron in the North. The problem is, once you are there, you still need transport for the last couple of hundreds kilometers. The next options are some (rare) packed up vinivans - here 25 people find space in a van for 9 and usually nobody speaks a single word of english. Not that I don't like challenges, but I heard enough nightmare stories of people being stuck for days in areas without any transport. So, the solution is to team up and find jeep or van.
Long story short, I teamed up with five others, we hired a Russian van and jeep including drivers and a translator and off we went for a great time.
It takes probably 30 minutes and you are out of Ulaanbaatar and there is nothing. No roads, no one, just the big nothing. I am still amazed how our drivers navigated without compass or map, just with their experience. I saw them only once over a map discussing where to fuel up the cars. The Gobi is actually not a real sand desert as you would imagine, but mostly sparsely vegetated steppe - a so called semidesert.
more images here
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| Shortly after leavin UB the road becomes a track... |
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...and the first Bactrian camels, the ships of the desert,
come into sight besides... |
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...massive amounts of Mongolian (half) wild horses. Apparently these horse have an owner!? Where are they and how do
they find their horses back? |
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| Our Russian Van - don't you love him? The view from the back is slightly limited but the clearance underneath is good. |
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| It is Mercedes fitout in Russian shell. |
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| Toilet for the... |
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| ...adjacent ger. |
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| Our second vehicle in our fleet, a Russian jeep with driver Gonchigdorj (we called him George as nobody could pronounce his name) underneath. Our fleet basically was repaired and maintained every time it stopped. |
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| Highlight of a full day, a tiny monastery with... |
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| ...the prayerwheel (watch the reflection of our Russian fleet)... |
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| ...and some colourful weathered details. |
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| Our van driver Bazaraa in full swing navigating... |
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| ...through the endless - but beautiful - nothing. Slowly the green steppe changed to sandy planes... |
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| ...which allowed our daily maximum speed to be up (kind of). |
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Out of nowhere there was some infrastructure besides the main road (the two tracks besides the masts are the main road
between UB and the Gobi)... |
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| ...but otherwise there was nothing... |
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| ...and nothing but rain that day for a change which... |
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| ...generated quite a moody feeling... |
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| ...along the rock formation... |
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| ...but good for some photos. |
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| Some locals in our cooking pots... |
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...while the locals need force to herd the stubburn, moody,
and smelly... |
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| ...Bactrian camels. |
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| The son of the family tries to tame the youngster while... |
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| ...granddad inspects his fleets of ships of the desert. |
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| And after another starry night... |
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| ...the drive in the nothing continues... |
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| ...past some civilization... |
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| ...until we reached Dalanzadgad with its Soviet style housing, the main city in the Gobi. |
continue in Gobi - Part II
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