(Español) Dia 2. Lun - Kharkhorin
Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.
Any sponsorship gratefully appreciated for a top charity.
Photos
Day 4
Arvaikheer to Bayankhonger (166.3 miles)
12 hours driving
Arvaikheer signalled the end of any tarmac roads in Mongolia. We’d done some off road driving previously and that hadn’t been too bad, if a little slow. However, this didn’t prepare us for the corrugated roads. Although there isn’t any tarmac there is significant amounts of traffic using these tracks and the tracks become corrugated, presumably by a mixture of the snow freezing and thawing and I’m pretty sure the heavy lorries have some influence.
Driving on corrugated roads is essentially the same as driving over about 20 mini speed bumps each second, so the car is rattling along. For hours on end. The key to successful corrugated road driving is to drive fast enough so that you skim over the top of all the bumps rather than getting stuck in each one, as this is bone shaking stuff and would trash the car (and your fillings), this means driving at around 35-50 miles an hour on roads that have big potholes almost everywhere and are gravel. Sometimes the corrugations get so deep that you loose total control of the car which is an added bonus, but there’s no using the brakes or that just sends you sideways. Pretty scary stuff but also really good fun as you have to hoon along gravel tracks and do feel like a rally driver throwing the car around to avoid the holes.
Just as the sun was setting the brakes went about 2 inches lower all of a sudden. They still worked but there was definitely something wrong. There’s no point driving in the dark on these terrible roads anyway as you make so little progress so we pulled over near the next ger we saw in the hope that we’d get to meet some nomads. Lots of guys came over and spent some time with us but no invite into the ger. Later on some kids came over who were really sweet, we gave some colouring pencils and things, they came back later with a kind gift of some aaruul which is dried milk curds - basically like a rock hard very strong salty cheese, and they eats slabs of the stuff. We had a little nibble to try to get involved, but the stuff was just to strong and rank to eat. And we could taste it for ages.
Day 5
Bayankhonger to Buutsgaan (165.1 miles)
10 hrs driving
Kids from the ger came over to give us warm mares milk and soft cheese for breakfast, we had a sip and a nibble to be polite but strong stuff and way too much to stomach at 7am. The Mongolians basically eat dairy products all summer and meat all winter, as they move around crops and veg aren’t feasible. This means that they all tend to smell of sour milk, which is nice.
Stopped at the next town to get the brakes fixed. The guys didnt’ talk any english but with sign language they showed us the brake fluid was leaking out of a pipe at the back. Then they cut the pipe off. This seemed fairly drastic as surely we needed that pipe or Daihatsu wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of putting it on surely? They seemed happy enough that they had fixed the car, and didn’t even charge us for their hour of work, so we set off with our fingers and toes crossed that the brakes would hold out.
There is essential one road that we needed to follow west all the way to the Russian border, but there can be as many as twenty tracks alongside each other as the roads are so bad people are creating new tracks. On this day we started getting problems with tracks that had obviously been used lots by lorries and so the rut in the middle is actually a good 30 cm high and even in a 4×4 we didn’t have enough ground clearance to travel on these and would have to balance on the middle rut and the edge of the road. Normally the tracks furthest away from the middle track are the freshest and so in better condition so we tended to try to use these. Unfortunately we found that the track we were on must have in fact been a turn off from the main route (there are no road signs so no way of telling and sometimes the track you are on will veer away from the others for 20 mins but you normally rejoin the other tracks). We stopped at a ger to check if we were going the right way, they told us we weren’t and invited us in to their ger for some fermented mares milk (reasonably pokey but bar far the best dairy product I’d had so far) and a massive pile of the dried milk curd. Very cool being inside a ger finally so not the worst mistake ever. The problem was that to get back to where we wanted to go we had to go over mountains and he was drawing the route in the sand - over the hill 2 to the left of the big mountain, then at the next range you go to the right of the big mountain. Simple huh? Was pretty daunting thinking we might get lost in the mountains away from the main road. Fortunately they decided to drive over the first mountain and show us the track we needed.
Later the road became so bad again that I thought we must have come off the main road as we were having to clamber over rocks, surely this couldn’t be the main way. Another 30 mins wasted looking for the main road, which we were already on.
Thought I could hear someone outside the tent as we went to bed. Alarm went off in the night which totally freaked me out. Pretty scary being in the wilderness and thinking that you might be raped and pillaged. Not a good nights sleep, thank god for daybreak!
Day 6
Buutsgaan to Altai (111.1 miles)
4 hours driving
Finally get some good miles done. We thought there was a good mechanic in Altai so when we arrived there at 12pm we asked that he check our brakes were OK quickly. He got in the foot well with a spanner and then they were much higher again. Left Altai but the brakes were rubbing really badly so went back. He put the car over the pit and hammered at the brakes, and then started taking rusting bolts off the petrol tank!!!!! As we’d just filled up with petrol the tank was leaking a fair amount but we knew this slows down and that it wasn’t an issue we needed to rectify, sometimes the stench of petrol was a nice relief from the stench of sour milk. He started undoing bolts that just crumbled and so I knew that he would have to take it off as it was no longer secured. He took the tank off and removed all the gel stuff that had obviously been put on it to reduce the leak, showing it to me as if he was doing me a favour. An absolute nightmare as he didn’t speak any english and we couldn’t get him to stop now. He took the tank off and showed us where it had been leaking and how it was paper thin. This seemed dangerously like the end of our trip which was rubbish. He then tried to get us to take a lada petrol tank in the boot of our car instead of our old tank underneath - this sounded very dangerous to us, especially on the bumpy roads we were on.
Fortunately at this point Espe got pretty upset and this seemed to give him the incentive to sort out our petrol tank rather than give us the Lada one. He told us it would take 4 hours and it was 5pm so we were stuck in Altai for the night and another day of pretty low milage compared to what we needed to do. It didn’t seem like we were ever going to make it through Mongolia.
We’de met quite a few Mongol Rally teams at the mechanics in the afternoon and they’d been giving us horror story after horror story. Telling us how bad the section coming up was, cars rolled, one guy who had been flown to Hong Kong with a broken back after a drink driver had smashed into their car head on. And then I saw a toddler getting run over by a 4×4, fortunately he got up straight away screaming which is always a good sign, cuts and bruises and just shaken up it seemed - a really horrific thing to see though. All in all not much of a morale boosting day and it had cost us 50 bucks to get a petrol tank fixed that we didnt’ want fixed.
Fortunately we met some Irish Mongol Rally guys later on who stayed in the town for the night too, went for some beers at the karaoke bar and they were much more positive about the whole experience which was definitely needed.
Day 7
Altai to Zereg (183.3 miles)
7 hrs driving
Shower number 2 in Mongolia. What a treat.
Try to leave and again the brakes are rubbing. Very frustrating. He takes off the brakes of one wheel, makes a big play on how some piece of plastic is broken and takes an hr to change this. Then at the very end he adjusts the pedal from inside the footwell again. Quite obviously he just tightened some cable up in there the day before and made the brakes rub and had no loosened it again. What an absolute cowboy.
Anyway at least we were finally off again. Feeling very vulnerable that the petrol tank would break if we hit anything and the brakes were exactly how they had been when they went funny originally but at least we were moving. There was also now a small hole in the exhaust from where he had taken it off to ‘fix’ the petrol tank. Bonus.
We finally hit the 1,000 mile mark and so stopped to get a photo. A dog in four pieces next to us on the road, nice.
We stop at dusk in a village of gers. And also no cars so we had to walk through really long grass and all of a sudden we could see a whole plain and hillside dotted with gers, normally you get one or two gers in each spot but here there were scores with smoke coming out of theur little chimneys which was a really fantastic sight. It was like a lord of the rings scene. The pictures will say it all, sorry they’re taking ages to upload.
We arrived at a ger where they were milking goats. They tried to show me how but I couldn’t get anything from the goats nips. They got Espe riding a horse which was her first time and very funny, the mother took me into the ger for some warm goats milk with butter in it which was pretty good.
They invited us to stay in the ger but unfortunately we needed to stay in the car as people had been cleared out of all their goods overnight in Mongolia. Not a side we saw to the country at all. They’re definitely very opportunistic and if you leave a car abaonded by the side of the road it will be stripped of absolutely everything, and then the shell will be taken, within days but we found the people of the capital very trustworthy.
RSS