The Gobi Desert. One of the harshest environments in the world...

Arnika gives the fermented camels milk a try

Day three of thirteen is spent travelling to the first real town of our tour. A seven or eight hour drive further south into the Gobi we drove to Dalanzadgad. The journey was nothing too exciting apart from the oppourtunity we got to try fermented camels milk. While driving along some rather empty piece of country there happened to be a man sitting on the side of the road. Our awesome driver Gana not being able to tell us what he was doing pulls over and starts talking to the man. The next thing we have an old soft drink bottle full of some milk like substance in the van. “Camel”, Gana says. Looking into our food guide of Mongolia where we see that a local delicacy is fermented camels milk. Skeptical about it we each took turns having a sip. After one sip, there was no need to re-try just in case we didn't catch the flavour the first time. It was absolutely horrible. Think of a nice beer, maybe stienlager pure, then mix it with milk, then leave it out in the sun for a few days, finally put a little camel urine into the mix.

Some locals on their motorbike, check the awesome head scarf

A marmot sits up for a photo

I wait for a hitch, it doesn't come, I'm still waiting till this day

Later in the day we arrived in Dalanzadgad. The first thing we noticed upon coming into the lovely paved town was the ridiculous signs pointing out that trees are the way of the future for Mongolia. This was rather ironic seeing after driving through Mongolia for three days we hadn't seen a single tree. But supposedly South Korea is planting lots of trees near Dalanzadgad LINK. Other than the sweet signs Dalanzadgad doesn't have much else going for it. Once you get out of the very small town centre there are no other paved roads and just sad square blocks of peoples houses. But interesting enough everyone actually lives in gers even though they are in a town and therefore not really packing up and moving down the valley every few months. This is like the old meets new, with traditional homes that have modern utilities like electricity but still not sewerage or water systems.

The sun sets over Dalanzadgad

Mongolian horses roam the steppe

The gang walks down into the ice gorge

After plugging in all our electronic devices we headed off to the town centre where there was a local market and a monastery. The market was basically just a place where country people come in to sell their animal carcasses and in return get some supplies for the countryside, so nothing really interesting for us apart from an ice cream. The sun set nicely over the monastery, night time came in, some vodka was drunk before heading to bed.

A goats skull marks a sacred site in the ice gorge

The ice gorge without a much ice

Deep in the ice gorge where the sun melts the ice

The next day we headed off for two days of exploring around the Gurvan Saikhan National Park. First destination was the ice gorge at Yolyn Am. After walking right past the actual gorge we walked around for two hours trying to find it and instead explored some scenic hills, we turned around and realised that the gorge was right near the entrance and so quickly walked down through it. The gorge was really impressive being a rather deep cut through a tightly winding valley. Along the gorge there are lots of sacred stone piles which give the place a magical feeling. But it was getting well into the afternoon so we headed off to the Bayanzag Flaming Cliffs.

The flaming cliffs I never really saw, thanks Tom for the photo

From the gorge it was about a three hour drive. Within an hour of driving I started to feel rather ill. We stopped along the way at some random yak statues, but I couldn't pull myself out of the van. Another hour down the road we were at the Flaming Cliffs, feeling terrible I hoped out the van because I really wanted to see a dinosaur fossil as which the Flaming Cliffs are famous for. I opened the van door and get out, basically I collapse onto the ground. Being a hard man, I still think I can enjoy the cliffs and so the drivers after checking whether I was still alive drive off to the other side of the valley where they'd pick us up after we'd found some fossils for ourselves.

Meet Gana our driver, my best Mongolian friend

I stood up with confidence, but the feeling was short lived. Everyone else was now getting into licking dirt to see if something would stick to their tongues which would confirm it being some kind of fossil. (please don't read the next wee bit if you don't want to read something disgusting.) After finding someone with some toilet paper in their pocket I had to find a small trench and lay my own dinosaur eggs. Soon the lower half of my body had evacuating its interior, but that was not enough. After catching a whiff of all the processed mutton I'd been eating the top half of my body evacuated itself through the dental exit. A delightful mixture of last nights mutton and lunch times self made pasta was now covering some undiscovered dinosaur bones. Feeling more relieved I kicked some dust over it to give someone in the future a nice surprise for when they are licking the dirt in search of a fossil.

This is me about to die

I'm stumble across the valley of dinosaur bones

I next had to doing a somewhat short walk across the valley. Normal people wouldn't find this too much of an extreme journey, but I was feeling like passing out. So being encouraged by Arnika and Tom, I crossed the ancient dinosaur valley to collapse into the waiting van. I spent the evening and night not enjoying life in a ger while throwing up and desecrating the squat which happened to be the most exposed squat in Mongolia, with only a small two foot high three sided wall stopping the bone chilling wind.

The girls walk get lost in the snow covered sand dunes

Thankfully the next morning I awoke feeling a lot better. So the journey continued, I didn't really take much notice of what was going on outside of the van on this day, instead just concentrated on the back of my eye lids and turned my body into recovery mode. Waking up, I found we'd arrived at another amazing location. The Khongoryn Els are Mongolia's largest set of sand dunes. Stretching over 100km, it felt as though we were in the middle of a classic sand dessert insert of the more scrub filled Gobi. Here the nomad family we were staying with owned a herd of camel that we got to ride up to the dunes. Seeing that their was only five camels and nine of us tourists we rode the camels in two parts. That is the first group rode to the dunes, were dropped off to play in them while the camels came back to the gers to pick the second group up then lead them to the dunes and pick up the first group and take them back to the ger and then return to pick up the second group. I was part of the second group and we got to the dunes after a pretty fun camel ride. Unfortunately the weather was changing and a little bit of snow was starting to fall. But we stayed in the dunes expecting the camels to return soon enough. After two hours of standing on the dunes which were now white with snow we finally saw instead of camels, our van coming back to pick us up. We ended up with only half a camel ride because the camel herder had just decided to let the camels rest instead of picking up the stranded tourists.

Camels are awesome, I wish i could bring one home

Me on a camel, woah!!! Misty the camel is the best camel ever.

I stand on the sand dunes while the snow begins

The camels tough it out in the snow

The gers after the snow starts to fall, pretty romantic

Back in the warmth of the ger, we kept a close check on the level of snow on the ground throughout the evening. The snow continued to fall, which didn't provide us with much confidence in the next day. This was lowered a little more when Gana indicated that the following day was going to be a lot of hills, so we'd best get moving at 7am. So after a short nights sleep we wake up to find it continued to snow throughout the night, and also to find that it was rather foggy and so visibility was down to about 100 meters. But this is Mongolia and waiting for the storm to pass isn't an option. So we packed the vans and took off.

Great visibility makes it hard to even see our own tracks we came across multiple times

More digging, in the background examples of the mountains we were driving over

The ger camp we stayed in was situated along a valley bottom and we had to cross the hills opposite the sand dunes to get to our next destination. Unfortunately the hills were actually mountains, and so we had to find the right 4wd track to make it over them. This took a good two hours of driving back and forth in the white out until some cloud lifted a little and the track was found. Finally running already well behind schedule we set off into the mountains which were under about a foot of snow, surrounded by cloud and with only a small 4wd track running up them that was very easy to lose. The following few hours were the most life threatening of our entire trans-mongolian adventure. Starting out with a breakdown of one of the vans, the drivers did a bit of tinkering, then we followed each other up. Making it about five mins at a time before a van would get stuck in a snow drift, we spent hours digging snow out from under the tires. Then each time we'd get stuck it would mean driving backwards and reattempting to bust through the snow drift. And if getting stuck in snow drifts wasn't scary enough, then driving along the mountains ridges where the track cambered to the point where it was seriously close to having a van tip over made the nature of the adventure very real and seriously putting thoughts of religion and after lives into our minds. Nothing was more welcoming than the buddhist goat monument marking the end of the mountain pass.

Driving along the mountain ridge

Dig Gana dig, a few feet of snow can't stop Russia's finest vans

A mountain goat sculpture welcomes us out the mountain pass

A look back at mountain pass we drove over, utterly glad to be out

All the hours lost before and during the mountains meant that we still had a seven hour drive left to Arvaikheer. There was no messing about once we got to our ger for the night, it was straight to bed where surely a few thank god we are still alive prayers went down while.