Mongolia Photos

MONGOLIA

Well, chilling out in Ulaan Bataar, but it wasn’t too easy getting here. We had the usual fantastic scenery for camping,

Local visitors on horses, all willing to help – we were changing a tyre at the side of the road here – trying to remove a commercial tubeless tyre, with tyre irons. We managed it, but it was slow work:

The roads were great fun, splitting in the middle of nowhere, possibly joining at some stage, possibly not, only way to find out is to go. The maps are pretty useless and the locals can’t really understand them – knowledge of the layout of the land is learned by experience, but maps just confuse them.

Lots of breakdowns:

The river crossings became pretty tough too. The Niva really showed it’s strengths here:

We considered the next one a bit more carefully, no problems there though:

Lost again:

These things, called Oovo’s are scattered throughout the countryside, at the top of hills, if you pass one, you have to stop and walk clockwise 3 times around it, for a safe journey. Modern Mongolians don’t have the time so just beep 3 times instead.

Not very many of these around:

Octane, down for maintenance:

Sometimes though, I got the feeling I just didn’t fit in:

We thought we were hard, but then we met this girl, Danelle, from New Zealand, she’s been to Laos, Cambodia and is heading to France, on a 250 cc Honda bike:

Eventually we made it to Ulaan Bataar, tough place, especially for tourists, we met another guy, Richard, who did the rally in a Shogun, so far he’s been mugged twice.

Secure parking for the Lada – most hotels have no parking so we paid for the best spot:

As soon as we arrived, the head of the charity wanted us to go to the border to make sure the most important rally car made it through, 2 guys were driving an ambulance, complete with piles of medical gear. We got to take our pick of rally cars. Had to be the Land Rover. We escorted them back to UB that night.