Part 4 - Wrestling Mongolians (Mongolia!)

 

 

 

MONGOLIA!  At last....!

 

We began with team Wrongolia, but such was our excitement at getting the car to some roads to which it was actually suited, nearly 8000 miles down the line, and such was the non existence of the ground clearance in their Ford Fiesta that we soon parted ways, with a slightly wistful “we’ll catch you up” in what we assumed was something of a Captain Oates style.  We didn’t see them again, indeed the last we heard before leaving Mongolia was that they had ditched the car and were continuing on their bikes (which they had with them).

 

The scenery was spectacular, with snow on the tops of the hills all around us, and it really did feel like this was the climax to the rally, and the reason we had come all this way was just so we could drive into this extraordinary country.  The roads were mostly fairly abysmal, and we quickly got used to asking everyone we met the way to the next place.  This generally elucidated a general wave in the right direction, although I could never quite shake off the suspicion that they were just responding to our cries of Khovd, along with vague gestures, by just repeating what we had just said and looking slightly quizzically at us.  We also got used to fact that the only way to work out the way was to rely on a general sense of the right direction, and just guessing when the road forked at random, with no indication of which path went where.  Often it didn’t matter at all, as they joined up again just over the horizon.  Often they didn’t, and it was not a rare occurrence to have to turn around and retrace our steps.  The first night we had to stop because we came to a large puddle/pond, we weren’t sure if it was the right way, and we couldn’t see how deep it was and thus if we could get across.  We were quite glad we did, it was the way but the section we were looking at crossing might well have spelled the end of the rally.  It was all great fun, and actually not nearly as difficult to drive, as we had feared it might be.  The other advantage was that because we were going much slower our reduced power was only a problem going up hill, and we struggled up those quite happily, if slowly.

 

Mongolian towns are few and far between: we came upon about 1 a day and the smaller settlements were generally just a small collection of buildings.  The rest of the population still live a nomadic life in their semi permanent tents, known as Gers.  These are white and circular and are dotted around the landscape wherever their owners feel like setting up home.  Nothing is fenced, and it is often difficult to tell what is wild and what has just been left to roam, particularly with the packs of horses.  Seemingly everyone we passed waved hello, and many of those stopped us for a chat.  Indeed we were often flagged down by passing cars for the same reasons.  I guess it pays to say hello in such a sparsely populated country, we found ourselves developing something of a royal wave after a while, as a lazier form of greeting.

 

The next time we stopped we had failed to find any petrol in Altai (the town not the mountain range) at about 4am, perhaps unsurprisingly.  Then the car just conked out just as we were pulling out of another closed petrol station.  Of all the places this could have happened we were remarkably fortunate to brake down in the middle of a town, so we just pushed the car to the side of the road and waited for first light.  The great thing about opening your bonnet and then standing looking confused is that it immediately attracts a curious crowd of onlookers, particularly when your car is small, foreign and toothpaste green.  As ever I could not fix it, but t friendly local appeared, had a look, fed us breakfast and called a mechanic.  After the mechanic was also fed breakfast we were towed to the garage.  There was one wonderfully surreal moment on the way we were flagged down by another rally car, a red Fiat Panda.  Instead of being full of ralliers, however, it was packed full of Mongolians.  It turns out one of them had been sold the car by the passing team, and then just patched it up.  They were having a wonderful time just buzzing around town with all their mates, showing off.  He immediately offered to buy ours too.  It was the first of many offers, there is obviously a Mongolia-wide shortage of crap cars as they were seemingly keen to buy just about anything, and pay well for it too.

 

It eventually turned out that the problem with the car was a loose wire, but the mechanic had a fiddle with our distributor too, and with seemingly great ease had the car running close to its sweetest again.  It was a huge relief, particularly as the roads after Altai showed a general marked improvement and we were able to take advantage of it, our imposing top speed of 55 briefly coming into play at times before our exuberance was curtailed by another round of potholes.  Potholes were taken to a new extreme just after Bayankhongor, which we passed through at sunset, it was once again dark and our previous bugbear of drivers not dipping their lights at night once again leapt up to bite us.  We were driving along a semi-built new road, which was raised up from the ground by about 4 feet.  As our friendly roadside neighbour approached I was completely blinded, and at the same moment a huge black hole directly in front of us, extending almost into the middle of the road.  The whole side of the road had been cut away, leaving a hole about 4 feet deep.  I managed to get the front wheels across it, unfortunately our back right wheel was not so lucky, and was left dangling over the abyss, leaving us teetering with 1 front wheel in mid air and the back one hanging over the drop. We escaped as quickly as we could, Harry was able to leap out onto dry land, I on the other hand had to rather gingerly climb out of the window to avoid landing right underneath our precariously balanced machine.  We were literally inches from the end of our rally.  Luckily the kind man who had virtually driven us off the road stopped and pulled us out, and the car seemingly escaped any damage at all.  The strange thing was that my immediate instinct on escaping the car was not to pull it out, or to get angry with our saviour/destroyer but to try and take photos of the car.  I guess by this stage we were so used to these unfortunate incidents that we didn’t even wait until after the event to start laughing about them.

 

 

 

A hotel room was eventually procured, although they did not look impressed with the fact we had not showered since leaving Samarkand – can’t imagine why.  And the great luxury of a bath laid into.  Despite having a pre-bath shower I still managed to turn the bath water so black that I couldn’t see from my knuckles through it to my fingernails.  Nothing like sparing you the gory details .  Cold beer and a flat bed then ensued, they have never been nicer.  The next morning Tom, the creator of the rally, appeared to give me a lift to his other creation, the elusive finishing party.  Harry sadly had to stay behind to organise his travel, and so missed out on the final excitements.  These were all happening in the camp we had left the day before, so off we set with a handful of other ralliers, and much to our mutual delight discovered a couple more teams had arrived by the time we got there.  We had a day of relaxing before the festivities began.  The afternoon of the party began with a ride on some Mongolian horses, which were small and hardy, and spent most of their time sneezing.  This little jaunt, until then mostly characterised by the attempts of a couple of first-time riders to make their horses go at all, let alone in the right direction, was jazzed up a little when after about 2 strides of cantering my horse tripped and fell, with me on top.  Luckily the horse was fine, and I basically landed on my feet as the poor beast fell to its knees.

 

This was nothing compared to the beating we took from the next bit of entertainment that had been laid on.  A group of Mongolian wrestlers had been rounded up, and proceeded to give us a highly energetic competition, over several rounds, before a winner eventually emerged.  Then the fun really began, as we were dragged up and paired off with a wrestler each.  To make matters worse instead of giving us an easy ride we were paired up with the winners, as if we were some strange part of their prize.  I got the runner up, who was considerably smaller than me but considerably more cunning.  Each time we grappled, I advanced and then found myself spinning round at an unsettling rate, each time faster than the previous fling.  3 times I was thrown to the floor, each thump harder than the last.  It was as if my only hope was to knock him off balance with the continuing reverberations from my previous pummelling.  It didn’t work, it only hurt.  Tom found more success in one of his attempts, getting his opponent in a headlock and then throwing him to the ground.  This gained a rousing cheer, which was only partly stifled by the revelation that he had just pulled off a massively illegal move.  It was actually great fun, if a little damaging to the old male pride.

 

Then the party properly began, not a moment too soon as I was in need of a stiff drink by this stage having been beaten up by a man half my size.  We had also all changed in to black tie by this stage, indeed I had donned my kilt, but we were massively upstaged by Doug of Team Jaws.  He could only ever be described as weedy n appearance, but having failed to bring his dinner jacket he had been required to think on his feet a bit.  The perfect solution had been discovered on the wall of the bar, the equivalent of a suit of armour, a proper Chinggis Khan style warriors outfit.  It made for a fantastic sight as he clambered up the sand dunes as the sun set behind us.  We then had a traditional Mongolian feast, Horhog I think it was called, which is a whole sheep cooked from the inside with hot coals, cut up and then crisped up over the fire.  Mongolia is not renowned for the quality of its cuisine, and rightly so, but this was excellent, rather like a hog roast except with mutton.  While we ate a Mongolian throat singer played some of the most incredible music I have ever heard.  They are capable of singing two tones at once, and some of the noises that came out of him were quite extraordinary, and completely inhuman.  At times he sounded like a giant wide-mouthed frog, albeit a tuneful one, and at others we began to wonder if he was in fact electric as there was no other way he could of sounded like that.  Some of the tunes were quite nice too.  As if we weren’t incredulous enough by this stage a 10 year old contortionist then appeared, and folded herself into some positions that would have been rejected from the exorcist for being too unlikely.  She really did look as if her body was back to front, and then with complete ease she did it while balanced on one hand just to top the whole thing off.  All in all it was quite a surreal night, and what a way to top off a slightly surreal trip.

 

After this it was back to Ulaan Baatar, a couple of hectic days trying to rescue my disintegrating travel plans, a day in Beijing and then home, although we did manage to squeeze a trip to one of Save the children’s projects, to whom a proportion of the money we have raised will be going, while we were there.  They appeared to be doing very good work with some fairly limited resources, we saw a community centre that apparently only cost £7000 a year to run and gave a huge number of extra resources to children in the local area, from somewhere to do their homework and to play to many educational courses that they run.  They also told us about their work with the street children that have been a terrible problem there, often living in the sewers, and it was great to hear somebody say yes, they thought things were getting better.

 

 

Final distance - 9000 miles

Time taken - 27 days

Times stopped by police – innumerable, we were stopped over 30 times just in Turkmenistan

Countries negotiated - 17

Engine oil used – approximately 40 litres

Breakdowns – didn’t count, probably 5 serious and a few more less so.

 

Things lost along the way

1 Haynes Manual

1 Shovel

1 Penknife

1 Petrol cap

1 Lonely Planet for Mongolia (at the Mongolian border)

1 Pair sunglasses (stolen)

1 Discman (stolen)

1 A/C inverter (stolen)

1 bit to hold the bonnet up

1 windscreen

1 Roof

Several marbles

 

Things gained from unknown sources

1 melon (we found it in the back of our car, neither of us put it there...)

 

Roadkill

1 Turkish cat

1 Cow

 

Bribes paid - 0!!

Money raised for the charities – now about £5000

 

 

Goodbye, and thankyou

 

Archie